It’s not linux’s job to be an ethical gatekeeper, within reason.
Let me ask you this; if you’re from a certain country, from a certain background or whatever, should you not be allowed to contribute the kernel? Or submit a bug report?
Devs of open source projects often find out others doing things they don’t like with their code. Or find major contributors have backgrounds they don’t like.
Happens all the time; drama ensues. But at the end of the day a permissively licensed project is out there, the work on it is done by whoever’s already contributed. And the Linux project, in particular, is not in the business of trying to personally judge every entity behind the code contributions.
I’d assert LLM agent usage is the same. Maintainers/reviewers don’t have to like LLMs, but it’s not really Linux’s job to judge who (or what) wrote the contribution; just if the code is good, or not.
I’d argue a different policy is a bad precedent. It opens the door to judging people, too.
And it’s also impractical. Contributors are going to use agents, so mind as well encourage them to attribute them rather than encouraging them to be unethical, and hiding it.
Now, should LLMs be maintainers? Hell no.
Should they blindly contribute code? Hell. No. Hence the policy requires a human to be responsible for it: https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html