Seems short sighted for an interim policy, to me. Why not just require clear and detailed disclosure of the use of said tools, to generate data for which to make a properly informed non interim decision?
We're talking about one of the biggest and most critical open source projects in the world, and unless there's some immediate urgency, it's okay to wait before taking on some risk.
I should add that the potential loss here isn't big. For any fix, enhancement, or feature in the JDK, the cost of writing the code is rarely more than 10% of the total cost (which is easy to see if you compare the number of people involved in the project to the rate of code being added or changed), and the interim policy explicitly does allow the use of AI where it helps the most.
If they held here that it is OK to use LLM generated code for OpenJDK it could kill these cases later as they will have established that they believe it is fair use.
This is ironic given how Oracle has bet almost everything on AI succeeding.
Bit of an oxymoron, no?
> just require clear and detailed disclosure of the use of said tools
Do you mean disclosure of the use of tools used "privately to help comprehend, debug, and review" contributions? Or do you mean that they should not prohibit AI-generated contributions?
If the former I wonder how useful the data would be, and if the latter, they are probably not (yet) willing to allow such contributions because of the mentioned risks: "to reviewer burden, to safety and security, and to intellectual property."
What I don't understand is: if you, for example, are a heavily AI-using dev, who spots a problem in OpenJDK, and you use Claude to figure it out: ok, why can't you then write the solution and PR yourself? Write your own code to replicate the functionality that Claude did, in your own style. Have Claude explain why this fixes the issue (it probably already did) and test it. If it works, write your own explanation and submit it as a PR.
I've done this a handful of times for smaller projects, in languages I'm unfamiliar with. Nobody complained because I didn't just copy the shit out of Claude, paste, copy the explanation, paste, and make a PR. I used Claude to increase my understanding, if even a bit and in a necessarily incomplete way, and did it myself.
You can. The policy explicitly allows you to use AI for understanding the codebase, debugging, etc. It just says “no AI generated content”. So if you use Claude to increase your understanding but then write your own code, that’s fine.
But even aside from the fact that writing the code is only a very small portion of the effort in this particular project (you can see that the volume of code making its way into the JDK is very small compared to the number of people involved), I'm often amazed by the gap between how well a frontier model (GPT 5.6 Sol in my case) can comprehend code and investigate a bug, and how badly it writes code and documentation, even when it understands things well. So not only is writing the code not a large portion of the effort in this project, it also happens to be one of the things current models don't do as well as other things.