Reddit's r/opensource has banned AI projects, including anything built with AI, made by AI or made for AI tools.

The moderators of r/opensource, a large Reddit community for sharing open-source software, posted new rules on Saturday evening that shut out AI entirely. "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource," moderator u/Wolvereness wrote, adding that "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community" (The Verge).

"Intended for AI" includes MCP servers, the small connectors that let AI assistants use other apps. The rules also require shared projects to be at least a year old, actively maintained and backed by multiple contributors, and they tell people who don't speak English to find a different community, because the moderators say they can't tell AI-written posts from AI-translated ones. The moderator said there is some room for judgment, such as software that only uses AI for an accessibility feature like automatic captions. Critics on X and Hacker News point out that even the Linux kernel now contains AI-generated code, and a breakaway community, r/trueopensource, has already formed (The Verge). Gizmodo highlights another line from the moderators: "Tokens are cheap, and we don't care how many you spent to make your amazing project" (Gizmodo).

What to watch: whether other developer communities copy the rule or push back. If you share open-source work on Reddit, check each community's rules before posting anything that uses AI, even a small part of it.