Kernel to drop Assisted-by LLM tag after summit consensus

Linux kernel documentation will stop requiring an Assisted-by tag on patches written with help from large language models, following a strong consensus at the 2026 Maintainers Summit that the tag no longer does the job it was kept for.

Sasha Levin posted the change on the kernel list. The tag was introduced so maintainers could spot LLM-assisted work and review it with that in mind. A bid to remove it was rejected in July on that basis. By the 7.3 cycle, only about 10% of non-merge commits carried the tag even though LLM use is far more common. Some contributors never learned the rule, others omit it deliberately, and few maintainers chase missing tags. Absence therefore says nothing about how a patch was made, and for developers who lean on the tools constantly, presence says little more.

Faced with enforcing the requirement or abandoning it, the room favored dropping the tag. Greg Kroah-Hartman, who had argued to keep it earlier, now supports removal. Maintainers still want to understand how a change was produced, but the preferred place is the cover letter, where authors can describe actual tool use, rather than a binary changelog line. Existing guidance that contributors stay transparent about generated content remains, as do the Developer Certificate of Origin and the submitter’s responsibility for the code.

The patch strips the Assisted-by material from the relevant process docs and translations and stops checkpatch from special-casing the tag. Reviews and acks from several maintainers, including Kroah-Hartman and Kees Cook, accompanied the posting.