GNU Compiler Collection - AI Policy

GNU Compiler Collection - AI Policy

Community First

First, all contributors should be treated with respect and kindness. There are strongly held and widely varying opinions regarding large language models (LLMs) and everyone should be presumed to be contributing in good faith. We welcome all contributors to the community even if they have not yet followed our policies; we should guide such contributors on how to do so.

Acceptable Contributions

For the time being, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) policy is to decline any legally significantcontributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content.

The GCC maintainers are free to accept legally insignificantcontributions generated by an LLM as long as they meet the usual prerequisitesfor any contribution and the contribution is clearly marked.

As an exception, the GCC maintainers are free to accept legally significantcontributions to test cases, generated in whole or in part by an LLM.

This policy does not apply to code which does not primarily belong to the GCC project, but is imported from other projects for convenience or to satisfy prerequisites (e.g. libsanitizer).

Transparency & Accountability

The commit message for any contribution of LLM-generated content must include an “Assisted-by:” tag.

All contributions must be submitted by a human who understands the changes and is prepared to answer questions about them. The decision to include the contribution in the project must also be made by a human. Only a human may provide the “Signed-off-by:” tag certifying the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). An LLM may not commit code to the project repository.

Personal Use

This policy does not apply to a contributor's other uses of AI including the use of these tools to enable them to work with their own computing devices e.g. screen readers, text-to-speech, direct translations, spelling or grammar assistance, where the contributor verifies the output of the tool.

This policy does not apply to a contributor's use of AI for the purposes of research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting (output should not be sent verbatim without due consideration), patch review (supporting human review, not replacing it) and debugging, so long as the output is not included in the contributions to the project. If the output is included in the contributions to the project then this policy would apply.

Next Steps

This policy is expected to evolve with the community or as the overall GNU Project position is updated. At the latest the policy will be reviewed at the start of 2027.

This work is marked CC0 1.0 Universal

For questions related to the use of GCC, please consult these web pages and the GCC manuals. If that fails, the gcc-help@gcc.gnu.orgmailing list might help. Comments on these web pages and the development of GCC are welcome on our developer list at gcc@gcc.gnu.org. All of our listshave public archives.

These pages are maintained by the GCC team. Last modified 2026-07-29.