Reddit's r/opensource has posted a new pinned announcement saying it will no longer accept any project that uses AI, is generated by AI, or is built to serve AI. The notice was published by moderator u/Wolvereness on the evening of Oct. 24 Eastern Time under the title "Your tokens aren't valuable. No more AI."
The moderator's position was stated directly in the post: "If your project used AI, was written by AI, or is intended to serve AI, then r/opensource absolutely does not welcome you." The announcement was addressed to a community of nearly 400,000 members and quickly drew broad attention.
New rules sharply raise the bar for project submissions
The announcement sets out several new requirements for projects that want to be posted in the subreddit. Under the rules described in the source, a project must have been actively maintained for at least one year, have more than three contributors, and already have an established community. The post also says common practice projects such as note apps and PDF readers will not be accepted.
The moderator added that the subreddit will no longer allow posts seeking maintainers or recruiting contributors. In practice, that means a new project that has not yet reached the three-contributor threshold cannot use the subreddit to find the people needed to meet that threshold.
The announcement also explicitly excludes MCP. As described in the source, even if code is written entirely by humans, middleware aimed at serving AI would still fall under the ban.
Account requirements and appeals were tightened as well
The restrictions do not stop at project criteria. Posters must also use a Reddit account that is at least one year old and has a substantial history of contributions.
If a post is blocked, users who send private messages to moderators to ask for an exemption may face a permanent ban and mute, according to the source. The only entities allowed to seek prior approval for an exemption are formally registered nonprofit legal entities such as 501(c) organizations.
The moderator also dismissed the cost of using AI tools in blunt terms. The source quotes the post as saying: "Tokens are cheap. We do not care how many tokens you burned to make this 'great project.'"
English-only language rule became another flashpoint
Another part of the announcement that drew criticism concerns language. The new rule says: "If you do not speak English, find another community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated content."
The moderator then argued that if a poster does not speak English, that person cannot verify whether a translation is accurate. Under that standard, a non-native English-speaking developer could still be treated as posting AI content even when using translation software only to turn a project introduction into English.
The post closed with another hard-line message: "If you don't like leaving this community for humans, let me know so I can show you out."
Critics said the rule could sweep in Linux and other major projects
After the announcement went live, users pointed to what they saw as a major logical problem. If the rule is enforced literally, a number of well-known open-source projects that already use AI-assisted tools in development workflows could also be excluded from discussion in the subreddit.
The source says tech blogger chasm posted a list on X naming 38 top open-source projects that would no longer be discussable under the new policy. The list included Linux, FreeBSD, systemd, QEMU, Chromium, Firefox, Python, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Git, Docker, LLVM, GCC, VS Code, FFmpeg, and OpenSSL.
According to the report, AI-assisted patches have already been merged into the mainline repositories of those projects, whether for writing code or reviewing it.
Linus Torvalds recently disclosed using Claude Code
The dispute widened because of a recent Linux kernel example cited in the source. Fourteen days before the moderator's announcement, on Oct. 10, Linus Torvalds created a branch named noref-filemap-read-with-llm in the official Linux kernel repository and submitted eight kernel patches at once.
In the "Tools" field of the official commit record, Torvalds wrote: "The code, test program, the review behind the list above, and the first draft of this text were all done by the large language model programming assistant Claude Code under my direction."
The patch set addressed a concurrency issue in the Linux page cache. The source says that on Torvalds' 4-core, 8-thread Core i7-8565U laptop, when eight threads simultaneously performed 16-byte reads, 99.92% of cross-core load was spent on lock contention.
After using an RCU, or read-copy-update, grace-period approach to delay memory reclamation without locking, eight-thread read throughput rose from 10 million operations per second to 33 million operations per second. Kernel cycles per read fell from 2,950 to 725.
The report also says Torvalds spoke at the European Open Source Summit the day before the patch submission and said: "Used correctly as a tool, AI makes programming much more fun."
The Linux kernel already has guidance for AI-assisted work
According to the source, the Linux kernel project has already formally incorporated an "AI Programming Assistant Policy" and a "Tool-Generated Content Guide" this year.
The report says the kernel project's core principle is not to judge code by the origin of the tool used, but to keep responsibility with humans. AI may assist with bug finding, function writing, and documentation, but every line merged into the kernel must be reviewed by a human and carry a Signed-off-by tag assigning responsibility.
The source also says official Linux documentation explicitly treats translating changelogs from other languages into English as a compliant use of tools, as long as the use is disclosed transparently.
Under the r/opensource rule as described in the report, even Torvalds himself could be banned if he posted his kernel branch there today because he used Claude Code and shared text drafted with LLM assistance.
More than 2,000 protest comments appeared within a day
The backlash inside the subreddit was immediate. The source says the pinned post's score was pushed down to 0 within one day, while the comment section filled with more than 2,000 protest messages.
One highly upvoted comment said: "This is fundamentally against open source. You can dislike AI, but that does not change whether a project is open source." The same commenter then argued that if Linus Torvalds now uses AI in kernel development, Linux itself would no longer be allowed on r/opensource under this standard.
The report also cites an independent developer who said a project maintained for nine years, with more than 300 stars and "absolutely zero AI" in the codebase, still lost posting eligibility because it had only one contributor rather than the required three.
Supporters said moderators were reacting to a flood of low-quality AI posts
Not every response opposed the policy. Supporters argued that the moderators' anger reflects the pressure the community is facing.
The source says that since 2026, falling token prices have lowered the cost of paying $20 for a subscription and producing a rough "vibe coding" project in two hours. Large numbers of AI-made projects that had not even passed testing, along with automatically generated promotional posts, were said to be flooding communities and exhausting unpaid volunteer moderators.
The article says communities have the right to set thresholds and reject low-quality projects. It also argues that the tool used to make something and the quality of the result are not the same question.
The reference material cited in the source is the Reddit thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1xelcuf/your_tokens_arent_valuable_no_more_ai/ . The article itself was credited to the WeChat public account "新智元," written by ASI启示录.