Fedora Linux project agrees to allow AI-assisted contributions with a new policy

AI generation, it's everywhere! And now it's going to be formally accepted into Fedora Linux, as per the latest approved change with a new policy.

The announcement came on the Fedora discussion board from Aoife Moloney that notes "the Fedora Council has approved the latest version of the AI-Assisted Contributions policy formally". The post links to what will be the final version of the policy and it seems at least reasonable, with whoever contributing the code being required to be fully transparent on what AI tool has been used for it.

Copied below is the approved policy wording:

Fedora AI-Assisted Contributions Policy
You MAY use AI assistance for contributing to Fedora, as long as you follow the principles described below.

Accountability: You MUST take the responsibility for your contribution: Contributing to Fedora means vouching for the quality, license compliance, and utility of your submission. All contributions, whether from a human author or assisted by large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools, must meet the project’s standards for inclusion. The contributor is always the author and is fully accountable for the entirety of these contributions.

Transparency: You MUST disclose the use of AI tools when the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes. You SHOULD disclose the other uses of AI tools, where it might be useful. Routine use of assistive tools for correcting grammar and spelling, or for clarifying language, does not require disclosure.

Information about the use of AI tools will help us evaluate their impact, build new best practices and adjust existing processes.

Disclosures are made where authorship is normally indicated. For contributions tracked in git, the recommended method is an Assisted-by: commit message trailer. For other contributions, disclosure may include document preambles, design file metadata, or translation notes.

Examples:
Assisted-by: generic LLM chatbot
Assisted-by: ChatGPTv5

Contribution & Community Evaluation: AI tools may be used to assist human reviewers by providing analysis and suggestions. You MUST NOT use AI as the sole or final arbiter in making a substantive or subjective judgment on a contribution, nor may it be used to evaluate a person’s standing within the community (e.g., for funding, leadership roles, or Code of Conduct matters). This does not prohibit the use of automated tooling for objective technical validation, such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, or spam filtering. The final accountability for accepting a contribution, even if implemented by an automated system, always rests with the human contributor who authorizes the action.

Large scale initiatives: The policy doesn’t cover the large scale initiatives which may significantly change the ways the project operates or lead to exponential growth in contributions in some parts of the project. Such initiatives need to be discussed separately with the Fedora Council.

Concerns about possible policy violations should be reported via private tickets to Fedora Council.

This also follows a recent change to the Mesa graphics drivers contributor guidelines, with a note about AI as well. Discussions on whether Mesa will actually allow AI contributions seem to still be ongoing though.

What are your thoughts on this?