Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to ‘fork it’
Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to ‘fork it’
Publish Date: 2026-07-16 08:12:00
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Don’t like that AI is used to develop and maintain Linux? Torvalds says: Tough!
- AI is part and parcel of developing Linux now, and that’s not changing.
- Other top Linux maintainers agree with Torvalds. AI is here to stay.
Many people hate AI. They don’t trust it a bit. Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, isn’t one of them. Torvalds thinks AI can be quite useful for programming and maintenance. Indeed, AI is explicitly approved for use in the Linux kernel.
However, that didn’t stop some people from wondering if AI should be used in Linux development. For example, the Zig language project has adopted strict policies against AI-generated code.
Also: ‘I’m not a programmer’ anymore: Linus Torvalds on the only two tools he uses now
To those who’d like to see Linux take a similar stance, Torvalds recently replied on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), that if you can’t support using AI in the Linux kernel, you “can do the open-source thing and fork it.”
He’s not joking. Torvalds also wrote, “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.”
Why? Because “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.”
Torvalds isn’t the only one
As Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, told me earlier this year, “Months ago, we were getting what we called ‘AI slop,’ AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality.” But then, he continued, “the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open-source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they’re good, and they’re real.”
Other open-source developers and maintainers agree. Starting with the 2026 frontier models, such as Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, AI…
