Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Annotating patches containing AI-assisted code

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 01:15:33PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
> The copilot case is going through appeal now, and I wouldn't bet on which
> way the outcome will drop.  It could very well yet result that AI output is deemed
> to be derivative work of the training data in some cases.  If that occurs, then even restricting
> training data to GPL code wouldn't be a sufficient workaround to enable using the AI output
> in the kernel.  And, as has been stated elsewhere, there are no currently no major models restricting
> their code training data to permissively licensed code.  This makes it infeasible to use
> any of the popular models with a high degree of certainty that the output is legally OK.

As semi-proof of this, everyone will note that the closed operating
system developer teams have NOT put their code into these public coding
models, NOR do they allow AI tools trained on these public models to be
checked into their closed source codebases.

So I strongly suggest that perhaps until that happens, we too should
seriously consider that the legal issues involved be taken semi-seriously :)

thanks,

greg k-h