Debian puts LLM-assisted contributions to a project-wide vote — four proposals from outright ban to accept-with-responsibility

Debian's 2026 general resolution on LLM usage opened its discussion period on 24 July 2026 with four competing proposals: ban LLM-assisted contributions to source packages, official software, web resources, documentation and translations outright; allow them under six conditions including disclosure, legal-compliance checks and limits on sensitive data; discourage them while conceding a ban is unenforceable, requiring human-written messages to humans plus disclosure; or accept them with marked attribution and a prohibition on cloud AI for sensitive data.

What it means Whatever Debian settles on becomes the reference text other maintainer-run projects copy — and every one of the four options requires contributors to disclose, which turns provenance from an ethics debate into a workflow requirement.