Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, recently stated at the Open Source Summit North America hosted by the Linux Foundation that his relationship with AI is ‘love-hate’ — “Technically speaking, I really like it; the tools are useful and interesting, but they do bring quite a few headaches.” He mentioned using AI to generate code for his personal ‘side projects’, though he still reads through the resulting assembly-level output himself: “You need to understand both your prompts and the final results, since those are what actually run.” Torvalds expressed skepticism toward claims that codebases are ‘100% AI-generated’, insisting that “AI is a great tool, but it’s just a tool.”
During the same talk, Torvalds also proposed a new rule regarding AI and security: if someone discovers a security vulnerability using AI, it should be treated as publicly disclosed information — “Because if you found it using AI, 100 other people have too.” This implies that AI-driven vulnerability discovery will drastically shorten the window between detection and disclosure, raising demands on security response timelines. On a positive note, Torvalds pointed out that the rise of AI has motivated NVIDIA to contribute more code to the Linux kernel — a change he welcomes. He also believes one of AI’s most promising uses is sparking young developers’ enthusiasm for programming.