OpenSSL Communities

Proposed AI policy

Jon EricsonJon Ericson Wed 13 May 2026 12:39AMPublicSeen by 90

There is now a proposed AI policy. For discussion of the details, please direct your comments to the PR itself. This discussion thread is a continuation of an earlier discussion. In a relatively short period of time we seem to have arrived a point where some allowance for AI seems necessary. Better to require people disclose the AI model(s) they have used and sign an updated CLA than pretend people aren't already contributing AI-assisted code.

Dmitry Belyavsky

Dmitry BelyavskyWed 13 May 2026 5:35AM

What I don't like in the idea is the resigning of the updated CLA. People are negative to the current CLA approach, and resigning will not make the situation any better

Tomas Mraz

Tomas MrazWed 13 May 2026 8:22AM

@Dmitry Belyavsky Only those that want to submit work generated by AI will need to sign CLA again. I do not think there is any way around that. Furthermore, we recently do not have any issues with signing CLAs. It was quite a while ago when we saw somebody not willing to sign a CLA. And, frankly, with AI we already have a lot of contributors, more than we can actually currently handle as for reviewing.

Peter Gutmann

Peter GutmannWed 13 May 2026 8:48AM

Could the existing CLA be taken to mean "does not include AI", so only contributors wanting to use AI would have to sign the updated CLA? That would restrict the disruption to only those affected by it.

Matt Caswell

Matt CaswellWed 13 May 2026 8:52AM

@Peter Gutmann that is exactly what the proposed policy says: "The old CLA remains valid for contributions that do not include non-trivial AI-generated content. If you are not using AI assistance, there is no need to re-sign."

Peter Gutmann

Peter GutmannWed 13 May 2026 10:41AM

@Matt Caswell Ah, reading comprehension fail, it's further down in the "The CLA Requirement" section.