Open source is more of an idea than a set of specifications, and that idea is now incompatible with AI, according to moderators of the r/opensource subreddit.
“In short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it is not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruous to this Open Source community,” moderator Wolvereness wrote on Saturday, in an article spotted by The Verge.
The new batch of subreddit rules announced by Wolvereness states that projects posted to r/opensource should not make obvious use of AI. “Tokens are cheap and we don’t care how much you spent on your amazing project,” the message explains. Another rule states that a project must not be “AI-facing,” that is, there must be no AI Model Contextual Protocols (MCPs) written by humans or other AI-adjacent projects.
Wolvereness’ post also includes rules unrelated to AI, such as banning posts from users who don’t speak English, projects less than a year old, and posts from Reddit accounts less than a year old.
As many AI supporters and anti-AI have already pointed out, projects considered essential to the open source movement now use AI coding, arguably making this subreddit an outlier. For example, open source pioneer Linus Torvalds announced that he was using Claude Code to write for the Linux kernel earlier this month.
While Reddit bans open source projects with ALL AI contributions, here is a list of projects you can no longer discuss here:
Linux, Chromium, Firefox, WordPress, VS Code, Python, VLC, Blender, Git, Docker, LibreOffice, React, Node.js, PHP, TypeScript, Rust, Home… https://t.co/96gsFVAXAb
– chasm (@chasmmmmmmmmmmmm) October 25, 2026
The developer world is currently in an ecstatic “open source” frenzy, as consumer AI coding has reached levels of sophistication that allow hobbyists to decompile programs as they wish. Users willing and able to spend massive amounts of tokens can write prompts asking models to work backwards, starting with published code that can only be read by computers and writing human-readable, and therefore editable, versions.
In some cases this results in clean room—that is, theoretically legal projects like ArtCraft, a free, coded recreation of Adobe Creative Suite, released under a new name. ArtCraft is labeled as open source and open for contributions on GitHub, but could never be allowed on r/opensource under the new rules.
all games are effectively open source atp, opus can reverse engineer any game efficiently by simulating controller/keyboard inputs and observing the state! Do this with enough instances/calculations that you can reverse engineer any game! https://t.co/a1g67EJj4f
— Rehan Sheikh (@rehan_shei) September 28, 2026
And a common refrain online lately is “all games are open source now,” but that’s entirely thanks to AI. Decompilation with AI has given rise to a flood of more legally questionable projects in which video games are decompiled, turning them into de facto free software, often posted on the r/decomps subreddit. This subreddit has also been flooded with AI lately, but in recent weeks it has developed its own open source philosophy including AI.
Generally speaking, the community on r/opensource seems receptive to the new rule, but with many exceptions. Those who feel alienated by the change have already joined r/TrueOpenSource, an AI-tolerant open source subreddit created yesterday.
An edition of Wolvereness embraces the schism, offering a “shout out” to the creator of r/TrueOpenSource and saying they hope it will be “a great refuge for those affected by this policy.”
Gn tech
