Community First
First, all contributors should be treated with respect and kindness. There are strongly held and widely varying opinions regarding large language models (LLMs) and everyone should be presumed to be contributing in good faith. We welcome all contributors to the community even if they have not yet followed our policies; we should guide such contributors on how to do so.
Acceptable Contributions
For the time being, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) policy is to decline any legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content.
The GCC maintainers are free to accept legally insignificant contributions generated by an LLM as long as they meet the usual prerequisites for any contribution and the contribution is clearly marked.
As an exception, the GCC maintainers are free to accept legally significant contributions to test cases, generated in whole or in part by an LLM.
This policy does not apply to code which does not primarily belong to the GCC project, but is imported from other projects for convenience or to satisfy prerequisites (e.g. libsanitizer).
Transparency & Accountability
The commit message for any contribution of LLM-generated content must include an “Assisted-by:” tag.
All contributions must be submitted by a human who understands the changes and is prepared to answer questions about them. The decision to include the contribution in the project must also be made by a human. Only a human may provide the “Signed-off-by:” tag certifying the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). An LLM may not commit code to the project repository.
Personal Use
This policy does not apply to a contributor's other uses of AI including the use of these tools to enable them to work with their own computing devices e.g. screen readers, text-to-speech, direct translations, spelling or grammar assistance, where the contributor verifies the output of the tool.
This policy does not apply to a contributor's use of AI for the purposes of research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting (output should not be sent verbatim without due consideration), patch review (supporting human review, not replacing it) and debugging, so long as the output is not included in the contributions to the project. If the output is included in the contributions to the project then this policy would apply.
Next Steps
This policy is expected to evolve with the community or as the overall GNU Project position is updated. At the latest the policy will be reviewed at the start of 2027.
This work is marked CC0 1.0 Universal