alt Hacker NewsOracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
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The link is to a really poor summary of a better article by the register.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...
The register article is about this post:
Disclaimer: I use AI at work and for some projects at home and find it really useful (as long as you know when and how to use it)
With that said... It's funny how we went from "vibe coding" to review burden, sloppy contributions, copyright issues, unclear ownership (as in: who will fix bugs), needlessly verbose code, etc, etc. Several projects have banned AI contributions now and counting.
As I said, I use AI to help architect and write code and really like it; still, I cannot even count the times anymore where the model (we use multiple of the frontier ones) has completely gone down the primrose path. I always make sure I make it my code, every line is reviewed and understood, maybe I rewrite the AI output here and there, I understand the tests and testing strategy, etc, etc.
So I wonder where this is all going. We are past "vibe" coding already, and so far monetization of AI has been "patchy". On top of that local AI is becoming more and more viable.
The post in question: https://openjdk.org/legal/ai
It is 'OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI' and their lawyers are writing the final version, according to this page.
It sounds like a sensible action, given past scars around Java and copyright, plus this is from a big old corp.
That said I personally don't expect that final proposal will end up any better.
I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”.
Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
Not too different from the recently-announced Rust guidelines at https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/05/rust-langr...
I didn't know openjdk was developed by Oracle. I always thought it was a community implementation of java as opposed to Oracle's proprietary implementation.
So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated code (theoretically) review their code better? The whole thing still seems a little strange.
y’all seem to be missing the fact that Java is a mature product. it has left the “move fast and break things” era of it’s development.
code is a liability, and they likely have more to lose than gain by allowing AI contribution.
Weird given how much Oracle has bet on AI, both in terms of data centres and in terms of layoffs.
Makes sense, there's some precedent that AI generated code is not copyrightable, it's essentially in the public domain for now.
Oracle likes its licenses.
Some important context - it appears it applies to submissions from the community but possibly not to core developers:
> Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models
So this likely falls more into the category of the inability of the core maintainers to manage the voluminous submissions coming from community than some broad ban of use in AI to develop it at all.
From the page https://openjdk.org/legal/ai -
"6 Is it okay to continue using the spell-checking, grammar-checking, auto-completion, and refactoring features in my editor or IDE?
Yes, so long as they are not based on large language models or similar deep-learning systems."
Banning Ai generated code is like telling people don’t look on stack overflow. I get the idea but it’s a blunt tool to that doesn’t solve the right problem.
Looks like they're stuck between their shady AI dealings and their shady IP dealings.
sips tea
It’ll be a licensing/copywrite concern. Large corporations using GenAI have guardrails and indemnity from their providers to protect them. Taking external contributions is more problematic, at the moment at least. So, in a standard lawyerly manner they shut it down until safe to do so.
Would Cursor tab assisted code be considered AI generated? I feel like that was the epitome of AI assisted but quality code
It's hardly a surprise to see a behemoth like Oracle doing this. Accepting LLM contributions can only be a liability, particularly for such a mature, stable project. Even if you see that liability as small or insignificant, it's non-zero. Given the project and the company, choosing zero additional liability seems like the obvious choice.
One also assumes the people maintaining OpenJDK have had their workload increase to an unmanageable level, like a lot of other free software projects and one thing I'm sure everyone can agree on is that Oracle certainly won't want to pay anyone more or hire more people to deal with that.
A lot of people (including the Register[0]) are pointing out that Oracle leadership are gung-ho about using LLMs for everything, and this seems to go against that. It makes sense to question this from a journalistic angle -- the executives are obviously full of shit and people would do well to remember that the next time one of them opens their mouth. But pointing at the apparent contradiction -- different rules for internal projects vs. open ones -- doesn't seem particularly meaningful on its own:
I don't think the CEO/CTO raving about LLMs should be taken as firm statements about how they actually operate internally. I'm surprised that this does not seem to be the default case. Among other things, Oracle stands to profit from greater adoption of LLM tools.
It would be unrealistic/unreasonable to expect their employees/contractors working on internal projects to be held to the same standard/guidelines/rules as developers contributing to a free software project. This applies either way, whichever side (internal/open) has the worse deal.
I don't know what the rules are for their internal teams. As far as I know, I'm not alone in that. Oracle also don't need to post anything publicly to change those rules.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...
Rules for thee, but not for me. well I don't expect better from tech companies now.
I don't think this is as big of news as it needs to be. The explanations are from a risk-management perspective.
While the Oracle hate boils, Zig, Rust,... aren't much different.
There is also the approach of Microsoft putting AI all over the place on .NET, and CoPilot driven development all over the place.
How does all this AI generated code blocking gappen? Does a human decide that or an AI is tasked with sequencing that PR's DNA to ascertain its possible inhuman origins?
What if someone generates code with AI and then goes into the IDE and then bathes it, dresses it (including adding comments) etc, in a way a human would? What then? No, here I am not exploring a way to fool the code DNA checking, but rather trying to find out what the real problem is with the AI generated code? (Other than license issues, too many PRs etc)
This is a friendly reminder from a grouchy old fart that
1. You are the engineer of record on all of your commits.
2. As the engineer of record, you have a certain duty of care with regards to code quality.
3. If you are not signing your commits, you are not providing reasonable provenance and instead tossing your name around in a way that anyone can replicate with impunity.
Shitposting, the reasons are very clear and explicit: The risks of having legal problems are very clear.
Google for example GEMA vs. OpenAI.
Oracle bans AI code from OpenJDK but I'm fairly sure the release notes have been written by a model for a year now.
How could we know whether incoming code is AI generated or not? are there tools for this?
This is the firm whose debt is one level above junk and whose survival as a single unbroken corporate entity is fully predicated on OpenAI being able to make money from the data centres they (Oracle) are building for them, let alone simply paying for them.
I accept @jerf's explanation is the right one but this is an absolutely almighty signal that AI-first developers should heed. And someone should ask Altman about it on the record.
"AI-generated code" will become shorthand for code-that-wasn't-verified-and-organized-by-a-competent-human.
AI for me but not for thee.
How would they even be able to tell the difference?
So Java, which powers a sizeable chunk of the real-world since two decades now, without needing the help of LLMish sloppy-pasta, is going to continue to power the Real World [TM] with its language and JVM that have been created with tens of millions of human man-hours without LLMish sloppy-pasta?
I'm shocked.
I'm not only shocked: I also see there a delicious irony in the countless of LLMish sloppy-pasta code that's now running and going to be run on man-made JVMs.
Linus might want to look over Oracle's reasoning and reconsider the potential legal harm that can come to the Linux kernel from accepting AI code.
How do you even enforce such policy?
How is this enforceable?
Deeply ironic.
I would laugh for a week if the courts eventually found issues with using LLM content and forced companies to either publish their LLM generated code as public domain or they were forced to roll back their codebases to a pre-LLM state.
Probably won’t happen but clearly Oracle sees a potential for legal issues with LLM output.
BREAKING Oracle pretends to be technical as we enter a new era where managers and corporate slobs larp as geniuses
So they will not be accepting most security patches. Fun.
Oracle is just selling AI shovels. Of course it would have a hard time defending IP issues in slop code when it had famously sued Google for Java infringement.
Also, Oracle knows that it will be stronger with strong IP laws. Other companies will realize that fact soon.
It's not Oracle that issued the ban -- it doesn't have that authority. It's the OpenJDK Governing Board. (Of course the latter generally follows Oracle's lead.)
That Oracle's policies over its internal code base are different is irrelevant.
Fascinating coming from a company hurting so hard from their over-leveraged positions in AI.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109165
Imagine Oracle suing themselves due to licensed use violations; can't have that!!!
They just have their panties in a bunch because that one guy on Youtube said they'd be the first domino to fall in the AIpocalypse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py23zYn1GMw
great now we will have slop , just not vibed slop
ORACLE???
Not long ago it seemed as if AI Skynet is winning the war.
Now slowly, the Empire strikes back - not just Oracle, but more and more resist the tyranny of AI skynet slop.
I am upset that these corporations drove up the RAM prices still. They need to compensate the rest of mankind for this - after all the chip market is a de-facto monopoly. They should all be sued into nothingness, then new laws must enforce healthy and fair competition, without unfair players driving up the prices willy-nilly style. Absolute AI mafia here.
lmao
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Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their code with no apparent concern for the provenance of it. The tech business would probably tell them this isn't going to be a needle they are going to be able to successfully thread, but the law firm is in the driver's seat.