With the widespread adoption of AI programming tools such as GitHub Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and ChatGPT Codex in development environments, large organizations are beginning to integrate AI-assisted code on a massive scale in enterprise-level software. For instance, Microsoft has internally announced that AI Copilot participates in reviewing and influencing hundreds of thousands of pull requests each month. To ensure the compliant use of AI-generated or AI-assisted code in the Linux kernel, the community has now established clearer written guidelines. Sasha Levin, a senior Linux developer at NVIDIA, has proposed a new initiative aimed at regulating the use of AI programming tools in Linux kernel development and clarifying the attribution requirements and development standards for related contributions. The proposal includes two patches: one adds a unified configuration file for multiple AI coding assistants to ensure consistency across tools; the other clarifies the development process, coding standards, and licensing requirements that AI must follow when submitting patches, mandating the use of the 'Co-developed-by' tag for transparent attribution. This proposal has been submitted to the community for discussion as a 'Request for Comments' (RFC), marking the gradual institutionalization of AI's role in core software development.
