COSMIC bans AI code, GNOME weighs AI bug reports

The move by System76's COSMIC desktop to ban LLM-generated contributions comes as the project nears its first stable release with Pop!_OS 24.04 in late 2025. COSMIC is a ground-up effort written in Rust, but it shares heritage with GNOME, which itself was announced in 1997 as a response to KDE's Qt licensing. GNOME remains the default desktop in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and many GNOME developers work at Red Hat, whose management has shown enthusiasm for AI. Michael Catanzaro, a GNOME developer, has consistently pushed for accepting AI-generated bug reports, linking to earlier posts and reducing the disclosure deadline for security issues from 90 days to 30, effective August 1. The article notes that AI is finding vast numbers of bugs across large codebases, and GNOME's heavy use of memory-unsafe languages makes secure coding difficult. The debate could widen: if AI bug reports are accepted, AI-assisted triage and fixes might follow, potentially leading to AI-generated extensions and core components. This path is already controversial in KDE, but Debian and the Linux kernel have allowed AI contributions, suggesting the outcome hinges on whether GNOME's leadership aligns with Catanzaro's view.