Reddit’s r/opensource bans AI projects and tells non-English speakers to leave

Reddit’s main forum for open source software has closed its doors to artificial intelligence, and to a large share of the people who write software. The moderators of r/opensource now reject any project that “uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI,” and the same rules tell anyone who does not speak English to go elsewhere. For a developer in Seoul or São Paulo who runs a post through a translator before sharing it, the forum is now off limits.

The moderators link the two bans. “We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated,” the rules post reads. “Since you don’t speak English, you can’t even verify yourself if it translated correctly.” Open source has always depended on people contributing in a second language, which is why that clause has drawn some of the sharpest objections in a comment thread that filled up overnight, most of it critical.

The AI clause is only part of the overhaul on a forum that lists close to 392,000 members. A project shared there must now be at least a year old, actively maintained and backed by several contributors, which the moderators define as “subjectively 3+”, along with an existing community and an OSI-approved license. Student-style projects such as note-taking apps, PDF viewers and command-line music players are out, and so are tools built for AI, with MCP servers, the plug-ins that connect chatbots to other software, named as an example. Posters need a Reddit account at least a year old with significant activity, and requests for maintainers or contributors are no longer accepted. A solo developer with a new tool loses one of the few places to ask for help. Registered nonprofits, or their equivalents outside the US, can skip the account and age minimums with the moderators’ approval.

The moderators say volume forced their hand. Wolvereness, the moderator who wrote the post titled “Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI,” cited about 20 messages a day asking for exceptions for what the post calls “slop projects and burner accounts.” Asked how anyone would decide that AI use is obvious, Wolvereness replied that there is no objective test. “The rule is written so that from a moderation perspective, we’re afforded discretion to remove as much ‘slop’ as necessary,” the moderator wrote, adding that software with incidental AI features for accessibility, such as automatic captions, may be tolerated.

That discretion is the weak point. With no test, the same post can stay up or come down depending on which moderator reads it. Commenters keep pointing at the Linux kernel, which now contains some AI-generated code, as The Verge noted; read strictly, any project built on Linux breaks the rule. The kernel itself is moving the other way. Its maintainers have agreed to retire the tag that asked contributors to declare AI-assisted patches, and Linus Torvalds, who created Linux, dismissed such rules on the kernel mailing list: “Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?” What he expects, he added, is that people “understand what they are doing,” and “that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.”

The ban also covers a single subreddit. Projects turned away there can still be shared on GitHub, Hacker News or open source communities that work in other languages, and nothing in the rules touches the code itself. Other projects have drawn harder lines on that front. Gentoo’s council has forbidden contributions created with AI tools since 2024, NetBSD treats code from tools like Copilot or ChatGPT as presumed tainted unless its core team approves it, and System76 has banned AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. Those rules govern what goes into a codebase. The r/opensource rules govern who gets to talk about one.

The rules went up on the evening of Saturday, October 24, and by the next morning the thread had drawn roughly 1,180 comments, according to a count by WebProNews. r/TrueOpenSource was created the same day, with a pinned thread for complaints and bans. Wolvereness later edited the original post to wish the new forum well as “a great refuge for those affected by this policy.” On the kernel side, the disclosure tag, required since January, is being removed under a patch that Nvidia engineer Sasha Levin proposed on October 9, and Torvalds posted his reply on October 13.

A forum that wants proof a human wrote every post will now have to decide, one moderator at a time, what a human sounds like.

Tags: artificial intelligence, Open Source, Linux, Linus Torvalds, reddit, content moderation