Linus Torvalds has made his stance on AI pretty clear: the Linux kernel isn’t against AI. During a discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds said developers are free to use AI if it helps them. In his view, AI is just another tool, and what really matters is the quality of the work. > “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.” He also said AI has already proved its value: > “AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.” > “It may not have been that ‘clearly’ even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.” Torvalds also pushed back against people trying to stop others from using AI: > “We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people using it.” > “This is NOT some kind of ‘social warrior’ project, never has been, and never will be.”

Linus Tech Tips commented on the ongoing Xbox layoffs At Bethesda: "If you're not working on TES or Fallout, forget about having a job." This matches what Schreier said about mass layoffs across the entire division and Asha Sharma's comments about focusing on big, proven IPs. “What I’ve heard from a person is that, as far as they know at Bethesda, if you are not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls, you might as well forget about having a job right now.”

Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel security mailing list is now almost impossible to manage due to a large number of bug reports from AI tools. In his latest update for Linux 7.1-rc4, he explained that the continued flood of AI reports has made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication as different people find the same issues using the same tools. Maintainers spend a lot of time dealing with the same problems repeatedly and often reply that they were already fixed weeks ago. The security list is for private and important security problems, but AI reports are not secret and create too much extra work. Linus says AI tools are great but only if they actually help rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-work.

Hello my name is Linus Gabriel Tech Tip and dbrand paid me a lot of money to tell you they're giving away free playing cards with every order for some reason: #ad#

This is a great real-world example of AI-assisted coding: Linus Torvalds just fixed a nasty Linux kernel GPU bug with substantial help from AI. The bug caused part of Intel Xe GPU compression metadata storage to be incorrectly exposed as usable VRAM, resulting in corrupted page tables and black screens. The eventual fix was basically a one-liner: round_up() → round_down(). Finding it was the hard part: 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots. Linus says AI did much of the grunt work, repeatedly adding debug code and analyzing the results as he narrowed down the problem. The funniest part: the AI repeatedly told him the problem was "impossible and unsolvable" and suggested giving up. Linus kept pushing it until they found the bug. And then he let the AI write the commit message. 😄