Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK despite Ellison's claim 'Oracle isn't writing' its own code
Oracle has prohibited AI-generated code from OpenJDK contributions, citing safety, security, and IP risks. Developers can use LLMs privately for debugging and reviewing, but cannot submit AI-generated material to repositories or pull requests. This policy contrasts with Oracle's internal practices, as co-founder Larry Ellison recently stated that AI models now write Oracle's code. Oracle is investing $70 billion in datacenter expansion, leading S&P to downgrade its rating to BBB-, one notch above junk.
The open-source Java project steward said developers can use LLMs privately for debugging and reviewing code but cannot submit AI-generated material to repositories, pull requests, or other project channels.
- jerf
Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their code with no apparent concern for the provenance of it. The tech business would probably tell them this isn't going to be a needle they are going to be able to successfully thread, but the law firm is in the driver's seat.
- fancyfredbot
The link is to a really poor summary of a better article by the register.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...
The register article is about this post:
- flakiness
The post in question: https://openjdk.org/legal/ai
It is 'OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI' and their lawyers are writing the final version, according to this page.
It sounds like a sensible action, given past scars around Java and copyright, plus this is from a big old corp.
That said I personally don't expect that final proposal will end up any better.
- cautiouscat
I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”.
Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.
- linuxhansl
Disclaimer: I use AI at work and for some projects at home and find it really useful (as long as you know when and how to use it)
With that said... It's funny how we went from "vibe coding" to review burden, sloppy contributions, copyright issues, unclear ownership (as in: who will fix bugs), needlessly verbose code, etc, etc. Several projects have banned AI contributions now and counting.
As I said, I use AI to help architect and write code and really like it; still, I cannot even count the times anymore where the model (we use multiple of the frontier ones) has completely gone down the primrose path.
I always make sure I make it my code, every line is reviewed and understood, maybe I rewrite the AI output here and there, I understand the tests and testing strategy, etc, etc.
So I wonder where this is all going. We are past "vibe" coding already, and so far monetization of AI has been "patchy". On top of that local AI is becoming more and more viable.
- jiffygist
I didn't know openjdk was developed by Oracle. I always thought it was a community implementation of java as opposed to Oracle's proprietary implementation.
- gred
Not too different from the recently-announced Rust guidelines at https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/05/rust-langr...
- midnightbobarun
So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated code (theoretically) review their code better? The whole thing still seems a little strange.