Creator of Linux, he adopts AI but refuses to let it sign his code

“99% of its code is now written by AI.” Likes, reshares, admiring comments. On the other side of the country, on the stage of the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis, the creator of Linux hears this kind of sentence and, in his own words, gets “literally angry”. It's not that he hates AI: it's quite the opposite, and that's where his point becomes interesting.

To go further

“Unmanageable”: Linux founder harsh on AI bug identification

Linus Torvalds spoke in May 2026 during a public discussion at the Open Source Summit North America. His idea can be summed up in one sentence: AI is a productivity tool, like the compiler in its time. On the figures side, he assumes: the Linux kernel has seen its contributions increase by around 20% over the last two versions, largely thanks to these tools. He got into it himself, after years of mocking skepticism. In short, he doesn't spit in the soup.

To properly situate the exit: Torvalds did not drop these words at random. The most repeated sentence (“the security list has become almost unmanageable, due to massive duplication: several people find the same bugs with the same tools”) appears in the note accompanying a candidate version of the kernel, in May 2026. The Open Source Summit keynote extended this observation in public.

“No one says the compiler wrote their code”

It is his comparison that is striking. According to him, people who brag about “99% AI-written” code forget that 100% of their code already goes through a compiler. And no one ever says “it’s the compiler who wrote my program”.

To go further

Even Linus Torvalds vibe-code

Where the formula becomes formidable is on the scale. Linus Torvalds estimates that the compiler has multiplied productivity by 1000. AI brings a factor of 10: real and useful, but a hundred times less transformative than the compiler in its time. In 2024, he still found the hype around AI “hilarious.” Since then, he vibe-coded a little audio visualizer during the holidays. The skeptic tried it, and he liked it.

The downside: small projects that sink

There remains a side effect that few people anticipate. AI allows anyone to generate a bug report in two clicks and then disappear.

Linus Torvalds summarizes the scene: sometimes the AI ​​reports a bug, we ask for details, and the author has already left without responding. “That’s the real problem with exhaustion,” he said. The Linux kernel takes it, with its thousand maintainers, its 35 million lines of code and its automated sorting tools. Projects run by one or two people drown. Worse: some companies flood open source with bugs detected by AI for visibility, without ever providing the slightest patch.

The sharpest part comes at the end. Those who do not understand the complexity of a system, warns Linus Torvalds, will still control it with prompts, and write processes that will end up breaking. Reliability, he warns, will be judged over time, a serious project is maintained over decades, not the time of a prompt.