Linux maintainers drop mandatory AI disclosure in patches

At the October 8, 2026 Maintainers Summit in Prague, Linux maintainers removed the requirement to tag AI-assisted submissions with Assisted-by. Linus Torvalds called an AI ban "utterly stupid" and submitted his own Claude Code-written patch.

• The Assisted-by tag is no longer required for Linux kernel patches
• Torvalds compared banning AI to abandoning text editors
• His Claude Code patch showed a 23x gain in a synthetic benchmark
• Reviewers flagged a race condition and memory reclamation concerns