Re: GCC AI Policy Announcement

On Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 8:51=E2=80=AFPM Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.=
com> wrote:
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> On Wed, 29 Jul 2026, 19:03 Richard Biener, <[email protected]> w=
rote:
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>> > Am 29.07.2026 um 17:30 schrieb Arthur Cohen <[email protected]=
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>> > =EF=BB=BFHi Richard,
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>> > What are the important LLM issues that you think the policy fails to a=
ddress? As the policy itself states, the it is expected to evolve and feedb=
ack is welcome. The goal is to continuously improve it.
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>> The policy grounds its rejection of legally significant LLM contribution=
s on legal issues (by means of naming).  It does not cover the IMO much mor=
e severe issues of overwhelming reviewers and keeping GCC maintainable.
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> Such contributions are not allowed by the policy, so we don't need to bur=
n reviewer time on them, and we don't need to worry that those contribution=
s will make GCC unmaintainable.
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> If the legal situation changes and somebody wants to argue for relaxing t=
he policy, they'll need to make a convincing case that it won't overwhelm r=
eviewers or lead to code nobody understands. Until then, such discussions d=
on't seem productive too me (but that doesn't mean they can't happen anyway=
).
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>>   It also makes LLM assisted contributions by maintainers who might want=
 to use LLMs to get to prototype stages fall into grey areas or even reject=
ed.  I realize the policy is not a discussion review document but what was =
the point of having the policy group when the outcome is just the obvious =
=E2=80=9Alegally unclear situation=E2=80=98 statement?
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> Now at least it's written down and we can point to it as the policy. Prev=
iously it was unclear whether this project cared about the legal issues.

It still leaves "legally significant" up to interpretation.  When
somebody posts a LLM [assisted] patch that is legally significant or
when I let an LLM
do a prototype to assess viability of an idea, is not any non-LLM
implementation of the same solution (as vague as that is) a derivative
work of
a possibly infringing work?  So is posting LLM produced patches to GCC
able to DOS GCC development this way?  Similar for the allowed
use of LLMs to analyze bugs or tooling.  How can that be legally sound?

Richard.

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> As Arthur said, this isn't expected to be the final policy that lasts for=
ever.
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