The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.

I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code. There are, at the time of writing, just over 1,200 kernel commits with an “Assisted-by” tag, from September 2025 to the present, most of which indicate patches which were written or assisted by LLM tools.

The second important use of AI for Linux comes with a new code review tool called Sashiko, which generates code reviews for patches considered for various subsystems. Sashiko ignited the current debate on AI in Linux because it pushes the envelope on AI in Linux: people who oppose or do not want to use AI could previously just refrain from using it to write their patches, but now there is a growing expectation that anyone who wants to contribute to Linux will have to interact with Sashiko or other AI tools like it to iterate on AI-generated feedback on their work.

One of the major lines of this discussion in the Linux kernel community has been with respect to the ethical considerations of the use of LLMs. Linus shuts this line of reasoning down entirely, firmly grounding the discussion in technical merits and rejecting any political discourse on the matter:

The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a side benefit, not the point of the project.

This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

This argumentation is disingenuous and hypocritical. Linux is a political project and Linus is a political actor. Consider the use of the GPLv2 for licensing Linux. One can argue from technical merits – for instance, the copyleft nature of the GPLv2 pushes people, and in particular commercial entities, to upstream their drivers and other contributions into the Linux kernel. This contributes to the technical excellence for the kernel as a result.

But is this not a political choice, and a political act? The purpose of this choice is to influence the behavior of others and to advance the interests of the kernel ahead of their own. And Linus stuck to this decision for political reasons when GPLv3 was introduced, reasoning from morality and ethics when objecting to the license and the manner in which it was deployed, and called for a tacit boycott of the FSF.

Linus, and Linux, wields a tremendous degree of power and influence over the world, and it should be wielded responsibly. When Linus says the following:

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

I find it completely disingenuous. Linus is surely aware that, for all practical purposes, Linux cannot be forked. It is the world’s largest software project, and one of the most well-funded, too. The institutional knowledge among its contributors, the prospect of keeping up with the blistering pace of change, or even putting together a group of people with the time and funding to understand and maintain even a fraction of the kernel’s code independently of upstream, is, quite simply, intractable. Linus knows, this, too – it’s an explicitly cited reason for decisions like the use of the GPL, GPL-only symbols, and the unstable internal kernel ABI: to make the process of independently maintaining a fork of the kernel as difficult as possible.

People are right to petition Linux upstream to amend its behavior and policies before resorting to the impossible. Working on Linux requires practicing politics, both internally – see for example Linus’ response to the discussions around bcachefs, which had high technical excellence and low social/political competence – and at the intersection of Linux and the rest of the world. Therefore, we must table political, moral, and ethical arguments when we discuss how we go about the work. It’s a cheap, weak argument to direct the discussion away from political and ethical considerations when it wouldn’t serve your point and to table it when it would.

I’m willing to believe that the LLM-powered Sashiko code reviews provide a lot of good insights. However, to address just one externality of this tool, consider that AI companies are driving up the price of consumer hardware. An AI powered code review may improve a patch, but that patch won’t be of much use to the increasingly large cohort of people who are being priced out of the hardware they could run Linux on to enjoy the better patch.

Looking at it from another angle: how many tons of CO₂ added to the atmosphere or liters of fresh water supplies disrupted is a tolerable price for a better code review? Temperatures during heat waves are exceeding 50°C in India, causing tens thousands of deaths. The AI built-out is by far the fastest growing energy consumer in the world, and they’re being built with fossil fuels, or drawing green energy demand away from replacing the fossil fuels depended on by other industries. The same process is pricing regular people out of the energy they need to power their air conditioner during those heat waves and the technology it enables is pushing them out of the labor market and into poverty.

These externalities are very real, and are affecting a lot of people, including Linux kernel contributors and maintainers, and their friends and families, who are trying to bring these problems to Linus’ attention.

And what of the intangible effects of the use of these tools in Linux? Linux is lending some of the project’s immense influence towards legitimizing the makers of these tools, and Linus’ insistence on focusing narrowly on the technical applications of these tools is a generous gift to them. They will be sure to mention his support in boardrooms, meetings between lobbyists and governments, and anywhere else it will advance their interests.

It’s fair to ask: what are those interests, and what are they doing with this influence?

There are a lot of smart, passionate people who care about these kinds of questions. Where is the technical excellence in refusing to do this moral calculus, refusing to allow anyone else to do so, and driving away the talented Linux contributors who care about these problems? Linus Torvalds, the Linux community, and all of our communities should have the courage and insight to address these dimensions of the AI question honestly and in good faith.