# GCC steering committee announces AI policy

> Source: <https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/>
> Published: 2026-07-29 14:38:44+00:00

The GCC steering committee has [announced](https://lwn.net/ml/all/CAGWvny=KZcazorvmCU3gdT4dBcMJm6S_769Ne+aTfbO_nZ_HsQ@mail.gmail.com/)
that it has accepted [an
AI contributions policy](https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a6a14bf9bfe9e92ac1599840780355199d) recommended by the GCC AI policy working
group.

The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any
"legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated
content or are derived from LLM-generated content

". It uses the [definition](https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant)
of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines,
which holds that the threshold is "around 15 lines of code and/or
text

" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC
maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test
cases that are generated by an LLM.

The policy does not forbid use of LLMs for research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting, patch review, etc. as long as the output is not included in contributions. The committee says that it expects the policy will evolve and will be revisited periodically.
