Emacs as a free software project focuses on empowering its users without compromising its ethical principles. As users of Emacs, we are interested in ensuring that we can continue to use it and contribute to it in good faith in the future.
Living thru 2026 as a software enthusiast has been a constant stream of betrayals; it seems like every week we're faced with the news that another program developed by people we thought we could trust has succumbed to the LLM onslaught. We have watched as even stalwarts like Vim and rsync have aggressively adopted LLM-driven development and alienated their core user base, leading to forks like vim-classic:
The current leadership of the Emacs project has indicated that LLM-based contributions will not currently be accepted to the project, which we are glad to see. However, this stance is a temporary measure that is only meant to hold us over until the GNU project finalizes their policy on LLM-based contributions:
We are awaiting the decision by the GNU Project on these matters, which will define the policy for all the GNU packages, and in the meantime we don't accept LLM-generated code, as a precaution.
[...]
Such policy discussions and decisions are not for the Emacs project to make, they are global for all the GNU packages, and so here is the wrong place to look for them.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-03/msg00425.html
We are concerned that this upcoming GNU policy may not hold Emacs to the high ethical standard that GNU has historically held. Given the overwhelming negative externalities of large language models, it's concerning that we haven't seen clear direction around this yet, and we are worried that when a policy does arrive it may not protect us from these problems.
Therefore we are here to declare our intent to use and develop a version of Emacs that is free from LLM-generated contributions regardless of whatever policy GNU decides upon. We invite them to weigh the costs and do the right thing, in which case we will continue to support them. But if they are not willing to do so, we will continue to use and develop an LLM-free version of Emacs anyway, even if it is not GNU Emacs.
It is not without hesitation that we drop the F-bomb (fork) here. Forks of Emacs have historically been very contentious and have not always had a good deal of success. However, in the case that GNU Emacs accepts LLM-generated contributions, we do not feel like we have much of a choice; giving up using Emacs for many of us would feel tantamount to giving up on computing altogether, or at least giving up on the parts of computing that bring us joy.
We also note that even if the top level GNU policy fails to address this problem, there is no reason Emacs maintainers cannot have additional policies on top of GNU's; contrary to the claim in the mailing list thread above there would not be any conflict in making the temporary ban permanent.
The Guix consensus document "Standing up for human crafting" does a great job of describing the motivation of why we require such a policy for a program that we rely on as much as Emacs. (Though the fact that they did not have the foresight to place a temporary ban the way Emacs did means that they felt forced to leave some unfortunate exceptions in their policy.)
We feel the harms are clear enough that it's not necessary to enumerate them afresh here; please refer to that document if you wish to read it laid out in detail.
We are not here to discuss whether LLMs are effective at what they are claimed to be able to do; their effectiveness is not at all relevant to the question of whether their use can be part of a principled software movement dedicated to user freedom.
We are not here to discuss "open weight" models; these are still built on a foundation of companies destructively mining the web from data centers that wreck communities. Such models cannot exist without exploitation. When a model can be fully trained by end users using data that was collected with consent, then we can talk about that, but right now that is nothing but science fiction and speculation.
We are not here to discuss how bad-faith contributors can lie about the provenance of their patches. This risk is not new; bad-faith contributors have always been able to lie about the licensing and copyright implications of a patch. It is enough to treat LLM-generated patches the same as other forms of plagiarism.
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