Asahi Linux moves all its code to the GPL, citing AI-assisted code laundering

Asahi Linux, the project that brings Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has announced in a progress report that it is moving all of its repositories from the MIT license to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later, so that its code will be under copyleft licenses only. The project announced the change a few days before November 9.

According to It's FOSS, which reports the project's statement, the team learned "some time ago" of attempts to exploit the permissive license: feature code still in development was lifted from developers' personal forks before release and published without attribution, or rewritten with LLM help to hide its origin. Asahi did not name anyone. It's FOSS says it is unclear how existing contributions will be relicensed and whether all past contributors agreed, and it points to two AI-assisted public forks of Asahi's work (Aurora Silicon's Borealis Vulkan driver and the Gravity Linux distribution) as context, noting that Asahi's report names neither. Asahi does not accept AI-generated code contributions.

The move drew criticism from the BSD side: OpenBSD developer Bryan Steele wrote on X on November 7 that relicensing m1n1 and the drivers without the consent of all prior contributors was "misguided". OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.