Linux Foundation survey: AI slop hits the largest projects hardest
Original title: AI slop is piling up highest on the biggest open-source projects
Of 234 respondents, large-project maintainers estimate nearly a third of queued changes are low quality or AI-generated.
A Linux Foundation survey of 234 open source contributors and maintainers finds AI-generated or low-quality submissions concentrated on the biggest projects. Maintainers of projects with more than 50 contributors now rank burnout above code quality, while the all-project estimate is about one in four changes. About a third of projects formally allow AI-assisted contributions and one in ten ban them. Curl’s lead said AI-slop vulnerability reports had stopped by April 2026.
Unconfirmed: The shares of AI-generated changes are maintainer estimates from the survey, not measured commit data.
- Most maintainers report more contributions since generative AI spread.
- About one in four projects has no check on AI-assisted code.
- Three in four maintainers use AI tools to summarize changes or look for logic bugs.
- Users say AI roughly halves coding time, but one in five say it slows the hardest tasks.
- Products
- curl
- Organizations
- Linux Foundation
From the original article
3 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
The maintainers of large open source projects are taking the worst of the AI slop. In a Linux Foundation survey of 234 open source contributors and maintainers, people running projects with more than 50 contributors estimated that close to a third of the code changes landing in their queue are low quality or AI-generated. Those maintainers now worry more about burning out than about the code itself.
By Mirko Zorz · helpnetsecurity.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.