--- title: AI in Linux | daily.dev description: Drew DeVault critiques Linus Torvalds' recent stance endorsing AI tools in Linux kernel development. Torvalds dismissed ethical objections to LLMs, framing... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-in-linux-rzpx1wixp twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI in Linux | daily.dev og:description: Drew DeVault critiques Linus Torvalds' recent stance endorsing AI tools in Linux kernel development. Torvalds dismissed ethical objections to LLMs, framing... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-in-linux-rzpx1wixp og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/rZpx1wixP.png og:image:alt: AI in Linux og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI in Linux **[Drew DeVault](https://daily.dev/sources/drewdevault)** · 6 min read · 1 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Drew DeVault critiques Linus Torvalds' recent stance endorsing AI tools in Linux kernel development. Torvalds dismissed ethical objections to LLMs, framing Linux as a purely technical project and telling dissenters to fork it or leave. DeVault argues this is hypocritical — Linux has always been political (e.g., GPLv2 choice) — and that forking Linux is practically impossible by design. The piece raises concerns about AI's environmental costs (energy, water, CO₂), hardware price inflation driven by AI companies, and the legitimizing effect Linux's endorsement gives to AI companies. DeVault calls on Linus and the Linux community to engage honestly with the ethical and political dimensions of adopting AI tools like the Sashiko code review system. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 5 discussions and 118 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-29). **TL;DR:** The community is largely skeptical of the article's argument that Linux should take a political stance against AI use on climate/energy grounds, though some raise legitimate concerns about proprietary AI gatekeeping kernel development and GPL licensing issues with LLM-generated code. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 35% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters note that open/local models could be a viable alternative to proprietary datacenter AI for kernel work. - A few argue that AI-assisted code review could actually improve security outcomes for Linux users. - One commenter points out that AI-assisted development may produce lower per-task carbon emissions than purely human development. **The pushback** - LLM-generated code poses real GPL licensing risks since attribution requirements may not be met and copyright status of AI output is unclear. - Relying on proprietary AI providers like Gemini for code review could effectively hand control of Linux's direction to hyperscalers. - Commenters note AI is driving up consumer hardware prices, potentially pricing users out of the hardware Linux runs on. - Several users point out that AI crawlers, spam, and slop are already degrading the broader software/internet ecosystem. - The energy and water demands of AI data centers are real externalities, even if commenters debate their relative scale. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Most commenters dismiss the article's climate-focused framing as whataboutism or virtue signaling, but a vocal minority raises substantive concerns about GPL licensing, proprietary AI lock-in, and energy costs. **Hottest debate:** Whether AI's carbon/energy footprint is a legitimate reason for Linux to restrict AI use, or whether it's disproportionate whataboutism compared to larger emitters like heavy industry or meat production. **Open questions** - What concrete policy should Linus or the kernel maintainers actually adopt regarding AI-assisted contributions? - Could requiring open/local models instead of proprietary ones (e.g., Gemini) address the gatekeeping concern without banning AI entirely? - How will courts ultimately rule on the copyright status of LLM-generated code contributed to GPL projects? **Highlights** > This is an important conversation to have and we should pretty clearly about what the issues are. I didn't see any objection to LLM assisted development in the abstract. The objection is to relying on proprietary AI providers in general, and Gemini in particular, via Shashiko. The problem is that kernel contributions could become gated by hyperscalers who can draw on compute power normal people can't access. Devault mentions data centers' carbon emissions and water usage. I find both of these objections to be distractions. It's not that carbon emissions don't matter. Keeping greenhouse gasses in check is incredibly important. But there are far more productive ways to cut carbon emissions than to block data centers. Heavy industry consumes far more electricity than data centers, for less economic value. This is even truer for water use. If carbon emissions is a major concern (as it should be), there are better targets to go after than data centers. A more compelling argument is the danger that the Linux kernel becomes something that's effectively controlled by proprietary AI providers: Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. The photo of tech company leaders at Trump's inauguration underscores their lack of any moral compass. But if AI-driven kernel development is actually useful and productive, that's going to be hard to turn down. If you believe that LLM use is technically counter-productive, then this whole AI thing is a bubble and you can just wait for it to pop. If you believe that LLMs can be technically productive if used correctly, and the drawbacks are entirely social, then it means giving up something technically useful. That is a real cost. I think Linus is right here: it would be hard for regular kernel developers to coordinate a fork of the project. It might not be that hard for the hyperscalers to simply fork Linux. They would still release the source code under the GPL, but nobody would be able to keep up with it. Ultimately, this could doom the human-written version of the kernel to irrelevance as most people switch to the faster/stronger/harder LLM-derived fork. Maybe a reasonable medium would be to insist on using an open model for code review instead of depending on Gemini or any proprietary model. > — [loudmax on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100571) > Torvalds' statement was incredibly disingenuous and rather sad. Every single commit is making a legal and political claim. Each commit is saying "this code is my original copyrighted work, and I am licensing it to the world per the requirements of the GNU GPLv2" (or "this code is someone else's work which was licensed under a compatible license, and I am integrating it into this GNU GPLv2 project"). That's not social warrior, that's simple facts. We don't need to try and guess motives or reasoning for people's contributions - that doesn't matter. What we have is an explicit declaration by virtue of the license, that the code being provided can legally be included in the GNU GPLv2 licensed "Linux" kernel. But with LLM generated code, this legal claim is dubious at best. For trivial (!= simple) code, one can probably argue that the LLM code will not be violating anyone's copyright, however for anything remotely novel, unless you are 100% certain that all of the training data was GPLv2 or compatible, it is not legally safe to use - and aside from that, even if all the training data was compatible with the license, the LLM will virtually always fail to properly attribute the source of its output, which is a requirement of - as far as I can tell - every license compatible with the GNU GPLv2. I cannot share GPL'd code and misrepresent it as my original work, I still have to make clear that it was someone else's creation. LLM generated code is a ticking time bomb, and is going to poison projects. Yes, it is possible to do this already without LLMs, but not by accident. A developer would have to make a conscious decision to violate someone's license in the past. Now it can happen without anyone being the wiser. And as someone who very much uses GNU GPL licensed software because of its license, this worries me for the future of software. On technical merits, it doesn't matter, but if you care at all about the artful expression of software, as well as honesty about who created what, this should concern you. > — [Magicrafter13 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099555) > The thing I'd worry about is it slowly handing over control of Linux's direction to the tech companies who control and regulate the AI being used to help develop it. The complexity is only growing. These companies are themselves extremely political and decide what AI is and isn't legal when Linux demands using the most capable models for security reasons. So it would be good at least if the project actually cared and had it's own principles besides ignoring the politics. > — [koolala on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099591) > It's disingenuous because it's attacking something that the article didn't say. It didn't say "kernel devs should prompt less because it uses up water." The real argument was that AI has many externalities that should be considered (climate change, water use, energy prices, putting people out of jobs) and that Linux, as a relevant and influential political actor, should engage with these topics. It's not even giving a final determination about what Linux should do, it's just disagreeing with Torvalds' total rejection of ethical arguments about AI. Even if you believe that the technical merits outweigh the other costs, it seems at least reasonable to engage on those grounds. But Torvalds isn't doing that. Also, simply stating that the "cat is out of the bag" and "Pandora's box is open" isn't really an argument. These are thought-terminating cliches; not logical arguments > — [ch71r22 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099834) > Incredibly useful for some definition of incredibly useful. What I see: - I now regularly receive AI-written spam emails (marketing pitches, "vulnerability reports"). - I was receiving AI-written garbage quality pull requests. It got so annoying I closed pull requests on my project's repo. - When I try to contact some company's customer support these days there's a good chance I will be fed slop by an agent posing as a customer support person, this is absolutely infuriating. - When I search for information on the internet, for certain queries, 90% of the results is slop. - AI crawlers are DDoSing websites. - The already mentioned things – hardware getting more expensive, climate impact, unethically sourced training data. > — [cuu508 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100432) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49097649) · 31 points · 114 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021509) · 10 points · 2 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073909) · 4 points · 2 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49085388) · 4 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041851) · 3 points · 0 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@agustinbarrientos** · 0 upvotes > Calling "fork it or walk away" realistic for Linux understates what a fork would have to replace. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Linux community's next big fight isn't about Wayland anymore; it's about whether AI belongs in your distro](https://daily.dev/posts/the-linux-community-s-next-big-fight-isn-t-about-wayland-anymore-it-s-about-whether-ai-belongs-in-y-1llxgq8is) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#code-review](https://daily.dev/tags/code-review), [#ethical-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ethical-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-in-linux-rzpx1wixp) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI in Linux","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-in-linux-rzpx1wixp","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-in-linux-rzpx1wixp"},"datePublished":"2026-07-23T13:07:00.775Z","dateModified":"2026-07-29T18:44:14.986Z","description":"Drew DeVault critiques Linus Torvalds' recent stance endorsing AI tools in Linux kernel development. 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