The goal of the AI policy is to ensure that contributors maintain the responsibility of understanding the change they are contributing. Adding AI agents as co-authors undermines this. I believe this philosophy should extend to commit co-authors in general: They should only be added if they themselves are capable of fully understanding the commit.
This contribution was sparked by maflcko's comment here: #35551#pullrequestreview-4642682025 .
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For details see: https://corecheck.dev/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls/35794.
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ACK f5d7cc66ecba075790e09b2933c782b218fa558f modulo IANAL, IDK if there are copyright issues with using/crediting work by LLM agents
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I understand why people feel the need to list the tools that contributed to their success, but it is a double-edged sword that also dissolves responsibility, which I think the author should fully bear.
AI agents are tools like compilers, linters, and text proofreaders. We don't add Stack Overflow as a co-author. We are expected to understand what we are doing, after which the idea becomes our own.
For example, I learned from @ryanofsky to add a characterization test before changing existing behavior, and now I apply that approach to every behavior-changing PR. It would be awkward to add him as a co-author every time I add the test before the code. It comes naturally to me now. I have internalized it. It's mine!
Similarly, if we still feel the need to add an AI tool as a co-author, it seems to me we haven't internalized its output well enough to be comfortable taking full responsibility for it.
if there are copyright issues with using/crediting work by LLM agents
The U.S. Copyright Office guidance explicitly says we don't have to add AIs as co-authors simply because we used them.
<details> <summary>Relevant U.S. Copyright Office guidance page 5</summary>
Applicants should not list an AI technology or the company that provided it as an author or co-author simply because they used it.
</details>
[!NOTE] GPT-5.6-Sol and Claude Opus 5 proofread this. They are not co-authors — if the grammar is wrong, that's on me.
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It doesn’t make sense to list a tool as a “co-author.” The actual author or authors are solely responsible for the content they push.
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Also, I want to mention that AI-generated commit messages can be hard to understand sometimes. It would be great if we discouraged them too, since it's another communication channel.
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