The use of AI has become a hot topic across many open-source projects, with many already taking a clear stance. Now AerynOS, an atomic-update-based Linux distribution that’s still in development and currently in alpha, has joined that conversation as well.
The distro announced on Reddit that it has formally adopted a project-wide policy rejecting the use of LLMs (large language models) across its development and community workflows, citing ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns.
Under the new policy, LLM-generated content is not accepted in any part of the project, including source code, documentation, issue reports, and artwork.
Project maintainers outline several reasons for the move:
- Ethical concerns about the data gathering for training these models.
- The disproportionate use of electricity and water of building / running them.
- The potential negative influence of LLM-generated content on quality.
- Potential copyright violations.
However, limited exceptions are provided. Contributors may use LLMs solely for translating text into English for issues or comments, and the project notes that additional exceptions may be considered for accessibility-related use cases.
Alongside the content ban, the AerynOS team has also addressed the role of LLMs in user support. The project strongly discourages relying on AI chatbots instead of consulting official documentation.
Additionally, support requests that reference misleading or incorrect LLM output may be ignored, as maintainers do not want to spend time tracing errors originating from third-party AI responses before seeking human support.
The policy applies going forward and is intended to preserve human-reviewed contributions and maintain technical reliability across the project. For more information, see AerynOS’s Contributing guidelines.
