open-slopware

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives.

The intention of this list is to raise awareness of AI/LLM usage in popular open-source software. Provided below is an informed set of AI-free alternatives for users and developers to consider should their ethical boundaries be crossed or tolerance for risk be exceeded. This list is not a resource to be used for the harassment of other open-source developers. If you wish to advocate for a "No AI" Policy from another project, we ask that it be done respectfully and constructively (and do not mention this list).

For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.

Want to add, update, or remove a project listed below? Check out our Contributing Doc.

See a project on here that you love, and wish wasn't on here? Check out our No AI Request Template.

Ready to fork a project to introduce a No AI policy? Check out our How to Slop Free Fork Guide.

Any other questions? Please check out our FAQ, and if your question isn't answered there, please feel free to start a Discussion.

• Definitions
  • Permissive AI Policy
    • Vibecode
  • AI Functionality
  • AI Code Reviews
  • Gen AI 'Art'
  • AI Sponsored
  • AI Databroker Usage
  • AI In Issue Tracker
  • Permits LLM Ingestion
  • Request for Help
• Sibling Repos
• Tainted Software
  • Accessibility Tools
  • Accounting and Budgeting
    • Accounting and Budgeting Alternatives
  • API Documentation
  • App Catalogs and Downloaders
  • App Launchers
    • Mobile Launchers
      • Mobile Launchers Alternatives
  • Audio
    • Digital Audio Workstations
    • Digital Audio Editors
    • Standalone Digital Mixer
    • Music Players
    • Podcast Aggregators
  • Backups
  • Benchmarking
  • Blogging Software
    • Content Management Systems
    • Static Site Generators
  • Books and Library Software
  • Bootloaders
  • Build Systems and Task Runners
  • Browsers
    • Browser Addons
    • Desktop Browsers
    • Headless Browsers
    • Mobile Browsers
  • Cheat Sheets and Documentation
  • Command-Line Shells
    • Addons and Prompts
  • Compiler Tools
    • Linkers
  • Computer Graphics
    • 3D Tools
    • Image Manipulation
    • Photography
    • Video
  • Continuous Integration
  • Cryptography
    • Disk Encryption
    • File Encryption
  • Data Archival
  • Device Exploiting
  • Documents
    • Document Converters
    • Document Viewers
  • E-Mail and Calendar
    • E-mail Desktop Clients
    • E-mail Mobile Clients
    • Calendar Mobile Clients
  • File Monitoring
  • File Storage
    • File Storage Alternatives
  • File Transferring
  • Filesystem Navigation
    • File Managers
  • Forum Software
  • Gaming
    • Cellular Automata
    • Game engines
      • Alternative game engines
    • Game Managers and Launchers
    • Mod managers
    • Emulators
  • Input Remapping
  • Language and Localization
  • Learning
    • Anki desktop alternatives
  • Mapping
    • Alternatives
  • Messaging
    • Messaging Servers
    • Messaging Clients
  • Microcontroller Tools and Libraries
    • Alternative Microcontroller Tools and Libraries
  • Networking
    • Networking security tools
      • Networking security tool alternatives
  • Operating Systems
    • BSD-based
      • Alternative BSD-based operating systems
    • Linux-based
      • Alternative Linux-based operating systems
    • Kernels
    • Other
      • Other alternative operating systems
  • Package Managers
    • Package Manager Alternatives
  • Peripheral Managers
  • Password Management
  • Programming Languages
  • Programming Language-Specific Tooling
    • C
    • C++
    • CSS
    • Dart
    • Go
    • Java
    • JavaScript And TypeScript
    • Lua
    • Python
    • Rust
      • Alternative GUI crates
  • Remote Desktop
  • Reverse Engineering and Debugging
  • Runtime Version Managers
  • Search Engines
  • Service Monitoring
  • Social Media
    • Servers
    • Clients
  • SSH
  • System Base
  • System Information Utilities
  • System Logs Managers
    • Android
      • Alternatives for Android
  • System Services and Daemons
  • Terminal
    • Terminal Emulators
    • Terminal Multiplexers
      • Terminal Multiplexer Alternatives
  • Text and Code Editors
    • Alternative Text And Code Editors
    • Note Software
      • Note Software Alternatives
  • Unified Push Distributors
    • Alternative Unified Push Distributors
  • Version Control
    • Version Control Clients and Tooling
    • Version Control Servers
      • Alternative Version Control Servers
  • Virtualization
  • Volunteer Computing
  • VPN Software
  • Window Managers
    • Desktop Bars
    • Desktop Shells
• Why not LLMs?
  • Legal Ramifications
    • Legal Cases And Law Problems
    • License Problems
  • Stolen Training Data
  • Environmental Impact
  • Labor
  • Poor Code Quality
    • Deskilling
    • Infosec risks
  • Health and Safety
    • Ties to the War Industrial Complex
    • Effects on Policing
    • Maintainer Fatigue
  • Effect on Hardware Prices
• License

Definitions

Term	Definition
LLM	Large Language Model, a language model trained on vast amounts of text (often entire websites without the website owner's permission)
slop	Anything generated by AI, typically code, books, articles, or images.
slopshop	Company, Organization, or Group of sloperators working together to use AI to generate content.

Below are special definitions that are used for tagging purposes.

Permissive AI Policy

A policy that permits the use of AI/LLMs in any capacity or is declared to be vibecoded. Both vibecoding and opening the door for people to vibecode count as a permissive AI policy.

Evidence can be:

• an explicit AI policy (e.g. AI_POLICY.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, developer docs) in the repo or something in the project's contributing guidelines or in their website's documentation that says that AI/LLMs are allowed
• an LLM friendly AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or other such LLM instruction files or folders.
• core maintainers' blog or social media post about vibecoding
• link to readme, website, or documentation stating the project is vibecoded

Vibecode

Asking an AI to write software for you (often without human review). Per Wikipedia:

In computer programming, vibe coding is a software development practice assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) such as by chatbots (programs that simulate conversation) or AI agents such as Codex or Claude Code. The software developer describes a project or task in a prompt to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. Vibe coding may involve accepting AI-generated code without reviewing the output thoroughly, instead relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI) in February 2025.

A Vibecoder is a person who uses AI prompts to generate anything, typically code or images. It would therefore be appropriate to call Andrej Karpathy a vibecoder.

AI Functionality

This would include the ability to enable or disable an AI feature, such as an AI assistant or AI summary feature. This would also cover the case when a project depends on an AI program or library, such as an LLM SDK.

Evidence can be:

• a link to the docs explaining the AI Functionality
• a blog post advertising the AI Functionality
• a link to the default branch in a repo that shows where the AI Functionality is implemented

AI Code Reviews

An AI agent/bot is used to review pull requests, which makes slop acceptance more probable and maintainability more difficult, especially when human reviews are scarce.

Evidence can be:

• a link to an AI code review requested by a maintainer.
• an AI code review CI workflow.
• a PR where an AI code review seems to be automatically created by some sort of third party app

Gen AI 'Art'

AI "Art" is being used in a project. This is typically for banners, avatars, promotional material, and/or blog posts. This means they're using tools that steal art from visual artists.

Evidence can be:

• link to the place where the AI "art" is used

AI Sponsored

The project is sponsored directly by an AI company. An AI company is any company that advertises itself as pro-AI or develops an AI product itself. The obvious ones are Anthropic and OpenAI, however, all the big tech companies (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon) also count because they all have AI services and direct products as major offerings.

Evidence can be:

• Blog post disclosing AI funding
• link to website that lists AI companies in sponsors list
• README that says "Sponsored by "

AI Databroker Usage

The use of an AI company as a third party service for processing user data.

Evidence can be:

• Blog post talking about using AI for processing user data
• Privacy policy listing an AI company as a third party service

AI In Issue Tracker

The use of an AI bot/agent for responding to Issues, Discussions, Forums etc related to a project's issue/bug tracking.

Evidence can be:

• Link to AI in an Issue, Bug report, Discussion, etc - must be related to the project's bug/issue tracking (e.g. dosu)

Permits LLM Ingestion

Permits the use of AI/LLMs to ingest the project's contents. This can be for "understanding the code better", "finding bugs/security issues/optimizations". This tag is to be used independently for projects that generally reject the use of AI in their code repositories, issue trackers, and sponsorships, but still encourage or permit users to use LLMs to ingest their code base.

The reason we still find this worthy of a tag is because it:

• means that the LLM, often provided by a company with very little respect for copyright, will then save a copy of that open source repo for use in it's future outputs.
• still encourages people to use LLMs and carves out a special situation in which they're still OK, but as this repo is against AI/LLMs for more than just "poor code quality" reasons, we still believe this is not a good course of action as it still promotes the use of inherently unethical tooling.

Evidence can be:

• An AI or Contribution policy that carves out a space for "using LLMs to understand the code" or "finding bugs"
• Core maintainer using or accepting the use of AI for finding Security issues

Request for Help

This means someone is asking for help with research. They would like it if you found the last known good version of a project or suggestions on alternatives for people to use. You can submit a pull request to add this info.

Sibling Repos

This is a section for repos that are similar to this one either because they are also forks of the original upstream, or because they align with our goal of identifying and avoiding AI/LLM usage OR identifying/elevating projects that do NOT use AI/LLMs. These repos are not all maintained by the same people, but we may share some contributors and are generally kind FOSS neighbors. ✨

• llm-afflicted-software offers a similar list to ours here, however in YAML file format for each category, making it more suitable to consumption via code (for instance writing a CLI, GUI, or TUI tool to consume it). They've also kindly reached out in the past and submitted Issues and PRs (e.g. #12, #22) to help us here.
• forge.starlightnet.work/Team/No-AI/ which is the repo for this no-AI list that lists projects that have explicitly pledged not to use AI or have an explicit policy to not use AI.
• slop-free-index is a list of software that has taken steps to reject AI in its development processes.

Tainted Software

Accessibility Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
espeak-ng	v1.52	(1, 2) (1, 2)	espeak1, flite
Nametag	v0.17.0	(1, 2, 3)	Monica

Accounting and Budgeting

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Actual		(1, 2)
beancount		(1, 2)
Firefly III		(1)
hledger (v2.x)		(1)
KMyMoney		(1)
ledger-cli		(1, 2)
ODoo		(1)

API Documentation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Scalar		(1) (1) (1)

App Catalogs and Downloaders

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
GitHub Store		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

App Launchers

Mobile Launchers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
KISS		(1)
Lawnchair	14.0.0-beta3	(1, 2) (1)

Audio

Digital Audio Workstations

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Audacity		(1) (1) (1)	Tenacity
Ardour		(1)	LMMS1
HISE		(1)	DPF
zrythm		(1)	LMMS1

Standalone Digital Mixer

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FineTune		(1)	BackgroundMusic

Music Players

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
somafm_tui		(1, 2)	soma-player
SimpMusic		(1, 2) (1)

Podcast Aggregators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
AntennaPod		(1, 2)

Backups

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Borg		(1, 2)
Kopia		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Restic		(1, 2, 3)
Timeshift		(1, 2, 3)	btrbk (btrfs-only)

Benchmarking

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Hyperfine	v1.19.0	(1)	poop

Blogging Software

Content Management Systems

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Backdrop CMS	1.33.2	(1)
Banany blog		(1)
Bludit		(1) (1)	WriteFreely
Drupal		(1) (2)
Ghost		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)	WriteFreely
Wagtail		(1) (1)	WriteFreely
Webiny		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	WriteFreely
WordPress		(1, 2) (1, 2)	WriteFreely

Static Site Generators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Hugo	v0.151.2	(1, 2, 3) (1)
Pelican		(1)
Zola		(1)

Books and Library Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Booklore	none	(1)	Clbre, Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, Calibre hard-fork from before AI
Calibre	8.15.0	(1)	Clbre, Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, Calibre hard-fork from before AI
KOReader	2023.08	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2)
Zotero		(1)	Citations

Bootloaders

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
barebox	fe328bc	(1)	Coreboot, EDK2 (UEFI), U-Boot
Limine		(1, 2)	Hyper, GRUB

Build Systems and Task Runners

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Bazel	9.0.2	(1)	Cloud Shake or See Below
Buck2	2025-10-15	(1)	Cloud Shake or See Below
Just		(1)	See Below
Mill	v1.0.6	(1, 2)	See Below
mise-en-place	659f851	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See Below
SCons	4.10.1	(1)	Waf or See Below
sbt	1.12.3	(1, 2)	See Below
Taskfile		(1)	See Below

Browsers

Browser Addons

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternatives
Stylus	v2.3.19	(1)	Stylebot

Desktop Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Chromium/Blink engine		(1, 2, 3)
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)
Ladybird		(1)
WebKit		(1, 2, 3)
Zen		(1, 2) (1)

Headless Browsers

Headless browsers are browsers, typically for server usage, that don't render web pages for humans to view.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Lightpanda		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)

Mobile Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)

Cheat Sheets and Documentation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cheat	v4.4.2	(1)
explainshell	1157256	(1, 2, 3) (1)
tldr-pages	v2.3	(1, 2)	ethical-tldr, ethical-tldr-client

Command-Line Shells

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
brush		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
nushell	0.79.0	(1) (1, 2, 3)
Oil Shell	dddab4a	(1)
PowerShell	v7.4.0-preview.2	(1, 2, 3) (1)
xonsh		(1)
yash		(1)

Addons and Prompts

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Atuin		(1) (1, 2)	Built-in shell history
oh-my-bash		(1)
oh-my-posh		(1) (1)
ohmyzsh		(1) (1, 2, 3)
spaceship-prompt	v4.19.3	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)
Starship		(1) (1) (1)	shmonad

Compiler Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Godbolt	d107352?	(1)
LLVM		(1)	GCC, Cranelift, pcc

Linkers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Mold		(1)	GNU ld
Wild		(1, 2, 3)

Computer Graphics

3D Tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Blender		(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
F3D		(1) (1)

Image Manipulation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ImageMagick	v7.1.2.16	(1)	GraphicsMagick, vips
excalidraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
LibreSprite		(1) (1)	Krita
tldraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
draw.io		(1)	LibreOffice Draw

Photography

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
darktable		(1, 2, 3)
RapidRAW		(1)
RawTherapee	5.12	(1) (1, 2, 3)

Video

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Fladder	ddb71ef	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
gstreamer		(1)
Jellyfin (server)		(1) (1)
Jellyfin Desktop	Use archived Qt-based client	(1, 2, 3)
Kodi		(1) (1)
mpv		(1)	MPlayer Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based) ffplay (ffmpeg+SDL-based) QMPlay2 (ffmpeg+libmodplug-based)
NewPipe		(1)	LibreTube
PipePipe		(1)	LibreTube
VLC		(1, 2) (1) (1)	Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based) ffplay (ffmpeg+SDL-based) QMPlay2 (ffmpeg+libmodplug-based)

Continuous Integration

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Act	v0.2.85	(1)	Forgejo Actions
Woodpecker	v3.12.0	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	Forgejo Actions

Cryptography

Disk Encryption

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cryptsetup		(1, 2) (1) (1)
VeraCrypt		(1, 2, 3) (1)

File Encryption

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
age	4a3a4ef	(1, 2, 3)	rage
gocryptfs	v2.5.4	(1) (1, 2)
Cryptomator		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

Data Archival

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
redumper		(1)

Device Exploiting

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
MTKClient	9f64e8e	(1)

Documents

Document Converters

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cmark		(1, 2, 3) (1)	Markdown.pl (md to html)
commonmark-java	e62bca1	(1, 2, 3)
Pandoc	0ce85b0	(1, 2, 3)	lowdown? Typst?

Document Viewers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Sumatra PDF	v3.5.2	(1)	Xournal++

E-Mail and Calendar

E-Mail Desktop Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Forward Email	v0.9.1	(1)
NeoMutt		(1)	mutt

E-Mail Mobile Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FairEmail		(1)
thunderbird android/k-9 mail		(1)	Simple Email

Calendar Mobile Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Giggity		(1)

File Monitoring

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
watchexec	2.3.2	(1)	entr, watfs

File Storage

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Ente Locker		(1)
JuiceFS	v1.2.3	(1)
MinIO		(1)
Nextcloud		(1) (1)
Rook/Ceph	v1.17.0	(1)
RustFS	None	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
SeaweedFS	3.87	(1)
Silo	None	(1, 2, 3)
Syncthing		(1, 2)
Syncthing-Fork		(1, 2, 3)

File Transferring

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
LocalSend	a14e610	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1)	LocalShare, PairDrop, Sharing, Warp
rsync	3.4.1	(1, 2)	openrsync, scp, an FTP client, tar

Filesystem Navigation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
eza	v0.21.0	(1)	ls
fd	v10.2.0	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	find
LSDeluxe		(1, 2)	ls
zoxide	v0.9.2	(1, 2, 3)	cd

File Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Superfile		(1,2,3) (1,2,3) (1)	lf, Midnight Commander, vifm
Yazi		(1, 2) (1,2,3) (1, 2)	lf, Midnight Commander, vifm

Forum Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Discourse	v3.1.0.beta2	(1, 2) (1) (1)

Gaming

Cellular Automata

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Golly	883b1ff	(1)

Game engines

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Godot Engine	4.3-stable	(1, 2)	Pandemonium Engine
GDevelop		(1, 2, 3)	Pandemonium Engine
GZDoom		(1)	UZDoom, Chocolate Doom
Jmonkey	3.6.1-stable	(1) (1)
Luanti	5.14.0	(1, 2, 3)	ClassiCube Cubyz Cubos
UPBGE 0.5	0.36.1	(1)

Game Managers and Launchers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Heroic	2.20.1	(1)
Lutris		(1, 2)	Bottles
TinyWiiBackupManager		(1)	See this post
umu	1.3.0	(1, 2)

Mod managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Modrinth		(1, 2)

Emulators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Amiberry	7.1.1	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	Denise
Azahar	2124.3	(1)
Cemu		(1)	decaf-emu
VisualBoyAdvance-M		(1, 2, 3) (1)	mGBA

Input Remapping

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
kanata	v1.9.0	(1, 2, 3)	keyd, kmonad
keymapper		(1, 2)	keyd, kmonad

Language and Localization

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Weblate		(1, 2, 3)

Learning

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Anki		(1, 2)
AnkiDroid		(1)

Mapping

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
BRouter		(1)
CoMaps		(1)
GraphHopper		(1)
Organic Maps		(1)
OsmAnd		(1)
OSRM		(1)
Vespucci	c1053f9	(1)

Messaging

Messaging Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Dendrite	v0.14.1	(1)
Nerimity	661d069	(1, 2, 3)
Synapse	b4282b8	(1, 2, 3)

Messaging Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
ArcaneChat	None	(1) (1)
Converse.js		(1)
Delta Chat		(1) (1, 2, 3)
Element Web		(1)
Element X Android		(1)
Element X iOS		(1)
Fluxer	None	(1, 2, 3)
gomuks		(1)
Mattermost		(1) (1)
Nerimity	9077876	(1, 2, 3)
Psi		(1)
Sharkord		(1, 2)
Telegram		(1) (1)
Zulip		(1, 2) (1)

Microcontroller Tools and Libraries

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
betaflight		(1) (1)
BouffaloSDK	2.0.0	(1, 2, 3)	See below
ch32-hal	07687b9	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
esphome	a31a5e7	(1, 2) (1, 2)
ESP-IDF	5.5.2	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	See below
FastLED	3.10.1	(1, 2, 3)	See below
WLED	62d3e15	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)

Networking

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
curl		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1)	Wget

Reverse proxies

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
caddy		(1, 2, 3)

Networking security tools

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Anubis	none	(1) (1, 2)

Operating Systems

BSD-based

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
DragonFlyBSD		(1)
FreeBSD		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
MidnightBSD	ed4b0a5	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)
OpenBSD	7.8	(1, 2)

Linux-based

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Fedora		(1)	See below
NixOS		(1, 2, 3)	GNU Guix System
OpenWrt	7214acd	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Ubuntu		(1, 2)	See below

Kernels

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
GNU Mach		(1) (1,2, 3)
Linux Kernel		(1, 2)

Other Operating Systems

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FreeDOS		(1) (1, 2)	MS-DOS source code (Expat/MIT license)
ReactOS	d4993c6	(1) (1, 2, 3)	Wine for some use cases
TrueNAS		(1)

Package Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
brew		(1)
macports		(1)
PiKISS		(1)

Peripheral Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Logitune	None	(1, 2, 3)

Password Management

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
AliasVault		(1)
Bitwarden		(1)
KeePassDX		(1, 2)
KeepassXC	2.7.9	(1, 2, 3)
vaultwarden		(1, 2, 3)

Programming Languages

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
.NET	v9.0.0	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
D	2.112.0	(1)	See below
Dart		(1, 2, 3)	See below
Elixir		(1)	See below
Gerbil Scheme		(1)	Chez Scheme Guile
Go	go1.22.4	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
Haskell		(1)	Idris (attempts to refine Haskell; Bans AI) SML (several implementations; community is nearly dead)
Janet	517e40a	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	See below
Julia	v1.11.4	(1 (1, 2)	See below
Kotlin	v2.3.0	(1, 2) (1)	See below
mruby	v3.3.0	(1) (1, 2)	See below
Nim	e2a3063	(1, 2, 3)	Ada?
Numbat	18f81b1	(1)
OCaml		(1, 2)	SML
Odin		(1, 2)	See below
Python	v3.14.0a4	(1, 2) (1)	See below
MicroPython	1.26.1	(1, 2, 3)	See below
CircuitPython	9.2.9	(1, 2, 3)	See below
Racket		(1, 2)	Chez Scheme Guile
Ruby	v3.3.8	(1, 2) (1)	See below
Rust	v1.95.0	(1, 2, 3) (1)	See below
Scala	v3.7.1	(1, 2, 3)	Scala 2.13.18, Scala 3.3 LTS, See below
Scratch		(1) (1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2)	Scratch 1.4 Scratch 2
TruffleRuby	v33.0.0	(1, 2) (1)	See below
TurboWarp	v1.15.0	(1, 2)	Scratch 1.4 Scratch 2
Typescript	v5.1.3	(1, 2, 3)	See below

Programming Language-Specific Tooling

C

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
cppcheck		(1) (1, 2, 3)	ccls?
cpplint		(1, 2, 3)	ccls?
Expat	2.7.4	(1)
gobject-linter	None	(1)
harfbuzz	12.3.2	(1,2,3)
LVGL	9.2.2	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
MbedTLS		(1, 2, 3)	See below
Mongoose	7a21199	(1, 2)	libmicrohttpd
OpenSSL	3.5.0	(1,2,3) (1,2,3)	See below
raylib		(1)
sd-bus (via systemd)		See systemd section	basu
SDL		(1)
WolfSSL	5.7.6	(1) (1, 2, 3)	See below
zlib-ng		(1,2,3) (1)	zlib

C++

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Scratch Everywhere		(1)
spdlog	v1.16.0	(1, 2) (1)
SQLiteCpp	v3.3.3	(1, 2)	SQLite's first-party interface

CSS

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
tailwindcss		(1) (1)	twind

Dart

Note that Dart is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Flutter	985576d	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

Go

Note that Go is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
debugui	f9c0b31a	(1, 2)
ebitengine	v2.8.7	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	Vuelto, Engo
goffi		(1)	go-ffi
gotests	v1.6.0	1	nxt_unit
oto	b71107cf	(1, 2) (1)	sio
purego	469dacd	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	go-ffi

Java

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Gradle		(1)	Apache Ant
libGDX		(1, 2)
Maven	3.9.12	(1)	Apache Ant

JavaScript And TypeScript

Note that TypeScript is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ArkType		(1, 2, 3) (1)
bun		(1, 2) (1) (1, 2, 3) (1) (1, 2) (1)
Deno	6002d26	(1, 2, 3) (1)
Electron		(1, 2, 3)	Use native GUIs, such as GTK
ESLint		(1) (1)
es-toolkit		(1) (1, 2)	Lodash
fnm		(1)	n
Next.js	v13.2.5-canary.0	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
npmx		(1, 2, 3) (1)	npmjs
nvm	v0.40.2?	(1, 2)
React	v19.1.1	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
TS for GIR		(1, 2, 3)
Typebox		(1, 2, 3)
Valibot		(1, 2) (1) (1)
Vite		(1) (1, 2) (1)
Webpack	v5.76.3	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Zod		(1, 2, 3) (1)

Lua

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Penlight	8bf90ff	(1)	Microlight Penlighter (fork, WIP)

Python

Note that Python is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Black	25.9.0	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Chardet	6.0.0.post1	(1, 2)	charset_normalizer
cryptography	44.0.0	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	PyCryptodome
isort	8.0.0	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1)
JupyterLab	v4.5.6	(1) (1)	Possibly GNU Emacs (1, 2)
Pygments	2.19.2	(1)
Pylint		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
pytermgui	v7.7.4	(1)
Requests		(1)	urllib.request (Python Standard Lib)
ruff		(1, 2, 3) (1)
Textual	v2.1.2	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Trio	v0.28.0	(1, 2, 3)
uv		(1, 2, 3) (1)
ty		(1, 2) (1)

Ruby

Note that Ruby is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Hanakai		(1)	sinatra
Ruby on Rails		(1)	sinatra

Rust

Note that Rust is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
c2rust	0.21.0	(1,2) (1) (1,2,3)
egui	0.31.1	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	See below
facet	cad0de9 as Shapely (before the facet-rs rebrand)	(1,2,3) (1,2,3)	nanoserde See note below.
iocraft	0.7.17	(1,2) (1, 2)	console, cursive
Matrix-rust-sdk		(1), 2)
Nextest		(1)	cargo test
PyO3	v0.23.5	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
ratatui	0.29.0	(1,2) (1,2)	console, cursive
rust-analyzer		(1,2) (1,2,3)	cargo check
Slint	1.14.1	(1, 2)	See below
wgpu		(1, 2, 3) (1,2,3)	ash, glow, vulcano
zbus		(1, 2) (1)
zerocopy		(1,2)

Remote Desktop

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
FreeRDP	3.20.0	(1, 2, 3)

Reverse Engineering and Debugging

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
binutils / gdb	928e6f5	(1)	See below
ImHex		(1)	See below
radare2	7a4aa2c	(1, 2)	See below
Rizin		(1)	See below

Runtime Version Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
asdf	v0.18.1	(1, 2)

Search Engines

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Searxng		(1) (1)	LibreY, marginalia, securityops.co

Service Monitoring

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Glitchtip		(1)
Grafana		(1) (1, 2)
Uptime Kuma		(1)
Vector	44562f6	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

Social Media

This is for both social media websites and apps.

Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Bluesky		(1) (1)	See below
rsky		(1, 2, 3)	See below
PeerTube		(1) (1)
Mastodon		(1)	See below
Misskey		(1)	See below
Lemmy		(1)	PieFed

Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
IceCubesApp		(1)	Feditext (iOS), wafrn-rn
Bluesky Social App		(1, 2, 3)	wafrn-rn
FeurStagram		(1, 2)

SSH

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ConnectBot	f523c43	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

System Base

This section is strictly for software implementing a core set of UNIX-like utilities and/or directly interfacing with several kernel subsystems. Think potential replacements for coreutils and util-linux.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
plan9port	0155f29	(1)
sudo		(1, 2, 3)	OpenDoas
sudo-rs		(1, 2)	OpenDoas
uutils		(1, 2 3) (1, 2, 3)	Busybox, GNU coreutils

System Information Utilities

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
fastfetch		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)	See below
hyfetch		(1, 2) (1, 2, 3)	See below

System Logs Managers

Android

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Logcat Reader	877cc0a, version 2.3.1	(1, 2, 3) (1)
LogFox	dd1405c, version 2.0.7	(1, 2, 3)

System Services and Daemons

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
framework-system	50a18e8	(1, 2)	BIOS settings, UI widgets, /proc
fwupd		(1, 2,3) (1, 2, 3)
libinput	43547b46	(1, 2, 3)	evdev
lvm2		(1,2,3)
Mesa3D		(1)
ntpd-rs	v1.6.1	(1)
rsyslog		(1)	syslog-ng
systemd		(1, 2)	dinit, s6, OpenRC, shepherd
wireplumber		(1)

Terminal

Terminal Emulators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Ghostty		(1)
iTerm2		(1)
Kitty		(1, 2, 3)
OpenWarp	None	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1)
Warp	None	(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Waveterm		(1) (1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Wezterm	712400a?	(1) (1)

Terminal Multiplexers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
tmux		(1)
zellij	1411b2d9	(1)

Text and Code Editors

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
CotEditor		(1, 2)
Flow	a782bfb (unsure)	(1, 2) (1)
Helix		(1)
Kakoune		(1)
Lem	e039567	(1) (1, 2, 3)
Microsoft Edit		(1) (1)
Neovim		(1, 2, 3)
Nextpad++	None	(1, 2)
Ox	v0.7.5	(1)
Qt Creator		(1)
RStudio		(1) (1, 2)
VIm	v9.1.0189	(1, 2, 3)
VS Code		(1) (1, 2, 3)
Zed		(1) (1, 2, 3)

Note Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Joplin		(1)
Logseq		(1)
Memos	v0.12.1	(1, 2) (1) (1)

Unified Push Distributors

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
ntfy-sh		(1, 2)

Version Control

Version Control Clients and Tooling

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Breezy	4559cec	(1)
Gerrit		(1, 2) (1)
Git		(1, 2)
Git for Windows		(1, 2, 3)
GitButler		(1, 2) (1, 2)
gitoxide		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)
Jujutsu		(1, 2, 3)
Mercurial		(1)
Sapling		(1, 2)

Version Control Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Gitea		(1, 2, 3) (1)
Gogs		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)
GitLab		(1, 2, 3) (1, 2)
Tangled		(1)

Virtualization

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Botspot Virtual Machine		(1)
Cloud-Hypervisor	v47.0	(1) (1)
Kubevirt	v1.5.0	(1) (1) (1)
VirtualBox		(1)

Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing is a system in which someone can donate (excess) compute resources to research projects.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
BOINC	3e5c24b	(1, 2, 3) (1, 2, 3)

VPN Software

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Headscale	474ea23 (v0.26.1)	(1, 2, 3)
netbird		(1)
nebula		(1)
frp	0.48.0	(1, 2) (1, 2, 3) (1)

Window Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Hyprland		(1)
i3		(1, 2)
IceWM		(1
MangoWC		(1, 2, 3)
Mir		(1) (1)
miracle-wm		(1, 2, 3, 4)
niri	v25.05.1	(1, 2) (1)
Qtile	v0.34.1	(1, 2, 3) (1)

Desktop Bars

Little bar on your desktop, kinda like a "start" bar.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Waybar		(1, 2)	polybar

Desktop Shells

All-in-one solutions for stitching together a desktop.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
DankMaterialShell	none	(1, 2)
Noctalia Shell	v2.7.0	(1)
Open-Shell	4.4.197	(1)

Why not LLMs?

Could use some help writing this with concrete receipts on environmental, social, political, and economic/labor harms.

Legal Ramifications

LLMs are often trained on, and thus prone to regurgitate (either completely, or in-part), chunks of code that are licensed under terms which have specific legal requirements that a contributor using LLMs may not understand or even be aware of when making a contribution. Regardless of this ignorance, it falls to the repo's owner to comply with the terms of any and all licensed code integrated into their project.

Legal Cases And Law Problems

• GitHub Copilot litigation
• IEEE article explaining concerns about AI generated code ownership
• Tracker of broader lawsuits against AI companies

License Problems

Legal, copyright, and ethics problems arise, especially with copyleft licenses such as the GNU (A/L)GPL. With the "help" of AI the copyleft code may be "license-washed" very easily.

There are ongoing problems with AI "license-washing" in the FOSS world:

• chardet - used an LLM to rewrite the codebase from the LGPL license to Expat/MIT (and later 0-BSD) license, violating the (L)GPL.
  • relicensed release: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0
  • original author's concerns: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327
  • "consumer's" concerns: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331

Stolen Training Data

AI companies use data from across the web to train their models, most often without the website owners' and users' consent. Big tech companies like Google and Meta are scraping data from the users of major FOSS projects, such as Mastodon, WordPress, and other ActivityPub-powered and self-hosted software.

• In 2023, the Washington Post published a list of sources in Google's C4 data set. A multitude of fediverse instances and personal sites were included. The fediverse is known for its userbase being major proponents of privacy and opt-in consent, making this especially jarring for those who have chosen to use decentralized social media for control over their data.
• In 2025, a similar leak of Meta's sources was published. Meta's list demonstrates how their integration of ActivityPub into their Threads software has enhanced their ability to scrape content without authorization. Threads is widely blocked in some parts of the fediverse, but their scraping of server CDNs has allowed them to get around that. Notably, both the CDN domains of the managed hosting services masto.host and fedi.monster are included in the list; large servers like mastodon.art, which is hosted by the former and has many artists who've left sites like DeviantArt and others due to their AI scraping of user content, had media unknowingly scraped.
• In March 2026, a research paper showed that simply fine-tuning LLMs resulted in outputs containing up to 90% of entire (copyrighted) books, contradicting LLM companies' previous statements in court that their models do not store copies of training data. After fine-tuning exclusively on a single author, the researchers were able to cause the LLM to output works from over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. None of the models were explicitly trained on these books by the researchers, which indicates that LLMs always carry with them a considerable amount of copyrighted materials from training.

FOSS projects listed in this repo are using tooling that blatantly disregard licensing and violate of Codes of Conduct, making said tools antithetical to FOSS' purpose.

Environmental Impact

To start learning a bit more, you can checkout the wikipedia page on Environmental impact of artificial intelligence. We're very open to people contributing other explanations, links, and resources to learn more about this. Here's what we've gathered so far:

• MIT News: Generative AI's Environmental Impact
• MIT Technology Review: We did the math on AI's energy footprint. Here's the story you haven't heard.
• Grantham Institute: What Direct Risks Does AI Pose to the Climate and Environment
• UCLA: AI is Destroying Our Planet
• The Guardian: Officials hugely underestimated impact of AI datacentres on UK carbon emissions
• KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law: The environmental costs of AI: a shake-up of the EU's twin transition
• Australian Parliament: Impacts of AI on the environment

Labor

AI usage and normalization contributes to labor violations in many ways that are obvious and some you may not be aware of.

On one hand, many things that you think are "AI" are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot for you for either extremely low wages or in some cases, no wages e.g. prison labor. This is particularly common for "friend"/"sex" bots, but it is also extremely common in the image/video identification. You can find a bit more info at the following links:

• Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AI’s development
• OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic
• 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back
• These Prisoners Are Training AI: In high-wage Finland, where clickworkers are rare, one company has discovered a novel labor force—prisoners.
• Amazon grocery stores previously reported to use AI actually used people in India

Poor Code Quality

Vibe coding / agentic workflows result in poorer code quality, and relaxed oversight practices. These effects may be compounded by the common practice of using additional LLM-based tooling to provide code-reviews.

• How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS
• Claude Tested Everything Except the One Thing That Mattered (AI agent refuses to follow explicit instructions to test createPost() in increasingly erratic ways)
• Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages
• GitClear has released reports in 2024 and 2025 indicating a worsening of key code quality metrics correlating with increased LLM adoption.

Deskilling

There is increasing evidence to show that LLMs negatively impact developers' coding abilities:

• Brains show less activity when completing tasks with LLMs compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
• Developers who use early-2025 LLMs reported higher subjective performance, but were measured to have lower objective performance. This gap between subjective and objective performance was considered notable.
• In an Anthropic study, learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
• A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
• A paper entitled "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" from April 2026 by academics from MIT, Oxford, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon showed alarming evidence that performing a variety of tasks with the help of AI for only 10 minutes causes "inpaired unassisted performance and reduced persistence". The researchers noted that "although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up"; they also pointed out that "these findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning".

Infosec risks

LLM usage results in massive security holes.

• Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails
• Moltbook's "vibe-coded" breach is the future of security failures
• In a study evaluating over 500k code samples, LLM-generated code was found to contain more high-risk security vulnerabilities than human-generated code
• LLMs make up package names, making them vulnerable to incorporating malicious code in "slopsquatting" attacks (Arxiv study)

Health and Safety

There's been a number of high profile incidents that have resulted in endangerment or death. Here's some examples:

• AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account

• Content Warning: Suicide

  • Wikipedia: Deaths linked to chatbots
  • AI chatbot pushed a teen to kill himself, a lawsuit against its creator alleges

LLM use has also been linked to new-onset psychosis.

Ties to the War Industrial Complex

A lot of AI companies also work directly with nation states for use in their Departments of War (sometimes called Defense) which in turn leads to further AI usage during war and invasions. This is coupled with NYT: Palantir, Anthropic and small start-ups are generating rewards from their investments in defense tech.

As another example NPR: OpenAI announced Pentagon deal after Trump banned Anthropic which was due to the USA Department of War launching an AI acceleration strategy.

Due to the nature of LLMs being only kind of as good as the data they are trained on, this can lead to additional civilian deaths and housing/infrastructure damage either intentionally or not. Examples:

Content Warning: War details, death

• Gaza: UN experts deplore use of purported AI to commit ‘domicide’ in Gaza, call for reparative approach to rebuilding
• Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes
• Microsoft says it provided AI to Israeli military for war
• Google has dropped its promise not to use AI for weapons
• "We want to use it for everything": How Project Maven became central to America’s AI-powered warfare

All of this to remind you that if you use AI, you're helping to support these companies and the additional activities they participate in, outside of generative code or images.

Effects on Policing

Police have quickly embraced AI, which has already directly led to people being jailed for things they've never done. As examples:

• This Grandmother was jailed for 6 months after an AI error linked her to a crime in a state she had never even visited
• How Wrongful Arrests Based on AI Derailed 3 Men's Lives

This is, in part, due to companies such as Amazon Aggressively pushing police to use AI which they do through both facial recognition and offering compute for predictive policing. With regards to facial recognition, here's an example of how it too can lead to false arrests: Face Recognition on Flawed Data.

There have been warnings about AI in policing, particularly around racial bias, such as:

• Bennan Center of Justice: The Dangers of Unregulated AI in Policing
• OxJournal: Predictive Policing or Predictive Prejudice? A Study of the Legal, Historical and Ethical Implications of AI in Policing
• The Guardian: Police AI Chief admits crime fighting tech will have bias...
• A third of all Black children were flagged by a child services agency

Maintainer Fatigue

Having to deal with the onslaught of many LLM written pull requests and issues, causes real maintainer burnout that stagnates projects as maintainers become overwhelmed with half baked, poorly written, insecure code. Here's some examples:

• Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure “intact mental health”
• Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions
• An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (matplotlib)

Effect on Hardware Prices

The demand for construction and outfitting of new data-centers to host AI/LLM compute capacity has overwhelmed global supply and production of multiple hardware components. Memory, Storage, and GPUs have seen massive increases in price for both consumer and enterprise models upward of 400% in some cases.

The lack of supply has led large system-builders to purchase production capacity from OEMs well in-advance of delivery leading some manufacturers to end consumer-oriented product lines in favor of enterprise capacity.

The down-stream effects for consumers is that near all electronic devices which contain memory and storage will see their prices rise and availability decline. Those who already own existing electronics and computer hardware components may also find themselves unable to have their devices repaired or replaced under warranty.

• The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

• Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place

• The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market

This all results in shrinking the pool of people who have access to building home computers for any purpose, from gaming to coding to home labs, which in turn makes the tech industry less diverse due to people who have been historically marginalized having less financial resources to learn the skills at home. When this is factored in with the price of college being unaffordable in many places, we will see a sharper decline in disabled people, people of color, women, and the queer community entering the tech industry.

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