'It's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either': Linus Torvalds addresses anti-AI sentiment in Linux development

Linux likers and AI dislikers, it’s time to raid the cutlery drawer and fork your favourite distro. Why? Because Linus Torvalds has declared that Linux is not an “anti-AI” project.

Torvalds recently responded to a discussion about Sashiko, an agentic Linux kernel code review system, writing, “I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects.” His full response has been preserved via the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, lore.kernel.org (via The Register).

If users and developers don’t like the project using AI, Torvalds instructs them to either fork their distro “or just walk away”. Torvalds goes on to argue, “AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.”

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He also notes that “yes, [AI] can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a ‘it keeps finding embarrassing bugs’ standpoint.” But, not dissimilarly to Microsoft and Firefox, he is apparently now welcoming AI as a tool that can help make the maintainer bug-hunt a little less painful.

It’s not a complete 180 from Torvalds—even if, back in May, Torvalds has previously lamented how the use of LLMs to find bugs was wasting a lot of the Linux team’s time. He explained then, “The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.”

Before then, during the Open Source Summit in 2024, Torvalds had described AI as “90 per cent marketing and ten per cent reality.” He also said: “Let’s wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements.” It would appear, as far as Torvalds is concerned, we didn’t even need to wait that long.

In his latest missive, Torvalds goes on to write: “We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.”

Torvalds also writes that, “the kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology,” and he concludes his missive by saying, “we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.”