{"id":290168,"date":"2026-07-16T08:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T12:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/16\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T08:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T12:40:09","slug":"linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/16\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to &#8216;fork it&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/\">Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to &#8216;fork it&#8217;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/\">https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-07-16 08:12:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.zdnet.com\">www.zdnet.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>    <span class=\"c-shortcodeImage_credit g-outer-spacing-top-xsmall u-block\">Screenshot from GitHub YouTube channel\/ZDNET<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Follow ZDNET: <span class=\"c-commerceLink\"><span>Add us as a preferred source<\/span><\/span> on Google.<\/p>\n<h3>ZDNET&#8217;s key takeaways<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Don&#8217;t like that AI is used to develop and maintain Linux? Torvalds says: Tough!<\/li>\n<li>AI is part and parcel of developing Linux now, and that&#8217;s not changing.<\/li>\n<li>Other top Linux maintainers agree with Torvalds. AI is here to stay.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Many people hate AI. They don&#8217;t trust it a bit. Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, isn&#8217;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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>However, that didn&#8217;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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Also: &#8216;I&#8217;m not a programmer&#8217; anymore: Linus Torvalds on the only two tools he uses now<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To those who&#8217;d like to see Linux take a similar stance, Torvalds recently replied on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), that if you can&#8217;t support using AI in the Linux kernel, you &#8220;can do the open-source thing and fork it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s not joking. Torvalds also wrote, &#8220;I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I&#8217;m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because &#8220;AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it&#8217;s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that &#8216;clearly&#8217; even just a year ago, but it&#8217;s no longer in question today.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Torvalds isn&#8217;t the only one<\/h2>\n<p>As Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, told me earlier this year, &#8220;Months ago, we were getting what we called &#8216;AI slop,&#8217; AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality.&#8221; But then, he continued, &#8220;the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open-source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they&#8217;re good, and they&#8217;re real.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Other open-source developers and maintainers agree. Starting with the 2026 frontier models, such as Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, AI&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to &#8216;fork it&#8217; https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it\/ Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":290169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/a\/img\/resize\/1e341850ca9f9088d031098518141edb740dcdfc\/2026\/07\/16\/4ba72f01-ab63-47e3-bdbf-bf06b587e12b\/linus-use-2.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=675&width=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[71,57],"class_list":["post-290168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","tag-linux","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290170,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290168\/revisions\/290170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}