Gentoo AI Policy (wiki.gentoo.org)

Gentoo’s Council voted on 2024-04-14 to ban any contribution created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI tools from Gentoo repositories and official projects. The rule is absolute unless a specific tool can be demonstrated to present no copyright, ethical, or quality risks; it explicitly does not block packaging or distribution of AI-related software or upstream projects developed using such tools. The policy affects content (documentation, patches, commits, etc.) submitted to Gentoo and is intended to be revisited if safer tooling emerges. The Council’s rationale centers on three technical risks: copyright uncertainty around model training data that could undermine Gentoo’s copyleft guarantees; quality problems because large language models can produce plausible but incorrect code or text, increasing review burden; and ethical/environmental concerns (alleged dataset copyright violations, large energy/water footprints, negative labor impacts, and facilitation of spam/scams). Practically, maintainers and contributors must avoid using LLM-assisted text/code for Gentoo assets and rely on human-authored contributions or fully-vetted tools, though the policy doesn’t specify enforcement or verification mechanisms—raising questions about detection and workflow changes for the community.