Linus Torvalds backs AI coding tools in Linux kernel tells critics fork it or walk away
Linus Torvalds told critics of AI coding tools that Linux is 'not one of those anti-AI projects' and they can fork it or walk away, per Tom's Hardware. The world's most deployed OS now treats AI-written patches as a review problem, not a ban problem.
The Linux kernel now has an explicit position on AI: Linus Torvalds told critics of AI coding tools on the kernel mailing list that Linux is 'not one of those anti-AI projects', that AI is a tool and 'clearly a useful one', and that anyone who fundamentally disagrees can fork the project or walk away, as reported by Tom's Hardware and Phoronix. The July 15 post followed a heated debate around Sashiko, an AI code-review system built by Google engineers and open-sourced in March 2026, which reportedly flagged around half of the bugs in tested code sets. Torvalds is not uncritical. In May he said AI-generated bug reports had made the kernel's security mailing list almost unmanageable, and he acknowledged that AI-assisted patches create extra work for maintainers. His position is narrower: decisions in the kernel are made on technical merit, not on fear of new tools. The ruling matters far beyond kernel developers. Linux runs most of the world's servers, clouds and embedded systems, and enterprise vendors track upstream norms closely. With the most important open-source project treating AI-assisted contributions as a review problem rather than a policy problem, maintainers elsewhere who want outright bans lose their strongest reference point. The practical question shifts from whether AI-written code enters critical infrastructure to how it gets reviewed on the way in.