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Add guideline about crediting tools as authors #1950
Description
Describe the enhancement or feature you would like
We now have many commits created with so-called AI tools. Many of them default to adding their name in a co-authored-by line in the commit message, which can end up in the upstream repo commit message if the person merging does not clean up the text box (this is a GitHub issue of defaulting to concatenating all commit messages, but can be changed per-repo to take the PR description).
There is an issue with considering this bots as authors. If a program is an author, is its output copyrightable? Does it infringe on the licenses of projects ingested in the training data? Do the bots need to sign a contributor agreement?
I don’t know why these tools do that; maybe it’s just for marketing (as the authors are visible in all pages with lists of commits), and maybe people keep it in good faith in order to disclose tool usage.
I think these lines should not be present, as they have risky implications or are just dubious free publicity.
Thanks for considering!
Describe alternatives you have considered
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Additional context
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Activity
merwok commentedon Oct 28, 2026
Adding some people involved in other policies PR: @hugovk @willingc @Mariatta @nedbat @savannahostrowski @StanFromIreland
willingc commentedon Oct 28, 2026
Thanks for raising the issue @merwok. Copyright and AI-generated code are still (and likely will be for the near future) a grey area in U.S. Law. I've seen pros and cons to co-author statements in other projects. Personally, I think legal counsel should weigh in on Python's interests and recommend a reasonable approach.
Mariatta commentedon Oct 28, 2026
Personally I have local agents instructions to exclude those trailers as part of the coding/pr creation skill. I wonder if we could add to the agents.md file to never add those commit attribution.
Not a lawyer so I won't comment about copyright or legality issues.
nedbat commentedon Oct 28, 2026
I guess the risk you mean is the copyright and authorship issue? I don't see how removing the line removes the risk. If the code was written by an LLM, it still was even if the message is gone. In the spirit of transparency, wouldn't it be better to keep the line?
I know some people don't like them because they are free publicity, but a footer line in a git commit message is hardly "publicity". You have to work pretty hard to find them.
hugovk commentedon Oct 28, 2026
The presence or absence of Co-authored-by trailers doesn't make any difference as far as the CLA goes.
The CLA bot ignores trailers, and ensures that the Git author of each commit has signed the CLA for that email.
See also @gpshead's reply at
https://discuss.python.org/t/cla-bot-and-ai-agents/106635/8.
vgnaik2004 commentedon Nov 1, 2026
merwok commentedon Nov 2, 2026
The consensus seems to be that things are fine as is.
I don’t like the in-between position. Either people believe these chatbots really understand things and really author code, in which case we should hold off until copyright issues are settled. Or they are just text generators with wiring automation and like any other tools shouldn’t be noted as co-authors.
nedbat commentedon Nov 2, 2026
I don't know which position is the in-between position.
No one can define "understand", so I wouldn't gate anything on agreement about that. And "we should hold off": on using AI tools? That doesn't seem like a possibility at this point.
At the very least, the polarizing and strong opinions about AI tooling separate them from other tools like text editors.