Debian puts AI contributions to a vote

Debian opened a 14-day General Resolution vote on whether and how the project should accept LLM-assisted contributions, with options ranging from a Social Contract ban to conditional use with licensing, accountability, disclosure, human oversight, and privacy requirements. The official ballot runs from August 15 through August 28 and says contributors remain responsible for what they submit; a separate first-call notice records the corrected ballot. Open-source maintainers should file Debian’s process as a governance precedent: the question is moving from whether developers use AI to what evidence, attribution, and review a project demands before accepting its output, alongside the archive’s runtime tax on AI-written C++.