Makes sense, there's some precedent that AI generated code is not copyrightable, it's essentially in the public domain for now.

Oracle likes its licenses.

Some important context - it appears it applies to submissions from the community but possibly not to core developers:

> Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models

So this likely falls more into the category of the inability of the core maintainers to manage the voluminous submissions coming from community than some broad ban of use in AI to develop it at all.

From the page https://openjdk.org/legal/ai -

"6 Is it okay to continue using the spell-checking, grammar-checking, auto-completion, and refactoring features in my editor or IDE?

Yes, so long as they are not based on large language models or similar deep-learning systems."

Banning Ai generated code is like telling people don’t look on stack overflow. I get the idea but it’s a blunt tool to that doesn’t solve the right problem.

Looks like they're stuck between their shady AI dealings and their shady IP dealings.

sips tea

It’ll be a licensing/copywrite concern. Large corporations using GenAI have guardrails and indemnity from their providers to protect them. Taking external contributions is more problematic, at the moment at least. So, in a standard lawyerly manner they shut it down until safe to do so.

Would Cursor tab assisted code be considered AI generated? I feel like that was the epitome of AI assisted but quality code

It's hardly a surprise to see a behemoth like Oracle doing this. Accepting LLM contributions can only be a liability, particularly for such a mature, stable project. Even if you see that liability as small or insignificant, it's non-zero. Given the project and the company, choosing zero additional liability seems like the obvious choice.

One also assumes the people maintaining OpenJDK have had their workload increase to an unmanageable level, like a lot of other free software projects and one thing I'm sure everyone can agree on is that Oracle certainly won't want to pay anyone more or hire more people to deal with that.

A lot of people (including the Register[0]) are pointing out that Oracle leadership are gung-ho about using LLMs for everything, and this seems to go against that. It makes sense to question this from a journalistic angle -- the executives are obviously full of shit and people would do well to remember that the next time one of them opens their mouth. But pointing at the apparent contradiction -- different rules for internal projects vs. open ones -- doesn't seem particularly meaningful on its own:

I don't think the CEO/CTO raving about LLMs should be taken as firm statements about how they actually operate internally. I'm surprised that this does not seem to be the default case. Among other things, Oracle stands to profit from greater adoption of LLM tools.

It would be unrealistic/unreasonable to expect their employees/contractors working on internal projects to be held to the same standard/guidelines/rules as developers contributing to a free software project. This applies either way, whichever side (internal/open) has the worse deal.

I don't know what the rules are for their internal teams. As far as I know, I'm not alone in that. Oracle also don't need to post anything publicly to change those rules.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...

Rules for thee, but not for me. well I don't expect better from tech companies now.

How does all this AI generated code blocking gappen? Does a human decide that or an AI is tasked with sequencing that PR's DNA to ascertain its possible inhuman origins?

What if someone generates code with AI and then goes into the IDE and then bathes it, dresses it (including adding comments) etc, in a way a human would? What then? No, here I am not exploring a way to fool the code DNA checking, but rather trying to find out what the real problem is with the AI generated code? (Other than license issues, too many PRs etc)