Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects

Codeberg, a community-led open source project hosting site, has banned projects whose code is largely or fully generated by large language models (LLMs) such as Claude and OpenAI Codex, following a community vote of 358 in favor and 144 against. The ban, which also covers cryptocurrency-related projects, aims to protect the FLOSS commons from license whitewashing and the externalized hardware costs of AI datacenter hyperscaling that have increased Codeberg's expenses. Codeberg argues that LLM-generated code undermines the open source community and is consistent with its existing prohibition on LLM scraping of project code.

Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against. In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only ‘license whitewashing’, but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized. Also covered is also the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up https://hackaday.com/2026/02/02/how-vibe-coding-is-killing-open-source/ by recent studies. Even if we ignore that such LLM-tools are destroying https://hackaday.com/2025/02/13/why-ai-usage-may-degrade-human-cognition-and-blunt-critical-thinking-skills/ the cognitive abilities https://hackaday.com/2026/04/13/the-use-of-llm-chatbots-and-human-cognitive-surrender/ of its users, there’s an argument to be made that if LLM-scraping is disallowed, then it’s consistent to also not allow LLM-generated code. In the Terms of Use you can see these changes, both for LLMs https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff879366d59bf1af54080c2 and for cryptocurrency https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/f383b648fd733ab88083dc390b91e77cd7589980 projects. Thanks to mk-fg for the tip.