r/opensource, one of Reddit's largest hubs for free and open-source software, has banned AI from the community outright — and the revolt arrived before the moderators had finished explaining the rule.
The announcement, titled "Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI.", went up on Saturday evening. "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource," moderator Wolvereness wrote. "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community."
The AI exclusion is only one of several new gates. Projects must now be at least a year old and actively maintained, have multiple contributors ("subjectively 3+"), avoid being a "common capstone project" such as a note-taker or PDF viewer, have an existing community, and carry an OSI-approved licence. Tools "intended for AI" — MCP servers, for instance — are out. Posting accounts must be at least a year old with "significant Reddit contributions", and anyone who messages the mods after a rejected post is permanently banned and muted.
Non-English speakers are effectively excluded too. "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community," the post reads. "We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don't speak English, you can't even verify yourself if it translated correctly."
Enforcement is explicitly a judgement call. Asked how "uses AI" would be assessed, Wolvereness replied: "There's no 'objective' way to implement this policy. The rule is written so that from a moderation perspective, we're afforded discretion to remove as much 'slop' as necessary." Registered non-profits can apply for an exemption before their first post.
The comments turned hostile within hours. The most-upvoted reply argued the policy is orthogonal to open source: "It's OK to not like AI but it doesn't change whether something is open source or not." Others pointed out that the Linux kernel now accepts AI-assisted contributions, which under a literal reading would put kernel discussion out of bounds; several asked whether Linus Torvalds himself would be banned. A maintainer of a nine-year-old package with more than 300 stars noted he would now be excluded for being its only contributor.
By Sunday a breakaway community, r/TrueOpenSource, had been created — and the mod team linked to it approvingly rather than fighting it.
The underlying complaint is real: maintainers are drowning in AI-generated pull requests, promotional posts for half-finished repositories and burner accounts, and Wolvereness said he fields around 20 modmail requests a day from people expecting exceptions. But the remedy targets provenance rather than behaviour. Open source is a licensing regime, not a statement about who — or what — typed the characters, and the rule arrives in a week when AI-assisted code is ordinary inside the very projects the subreddit exists to discuss.
