The move has come after the Asahi team was made aware “some time ago” of multiple attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to hijack its work.
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The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD’s Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi’s m1n1 bootloader.
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What is code laundering?
In the most extreme cases, feature code that was still under development was lifted from developers’ personal forks before it was even publicly released. The report points out that the MIT license “explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.”As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI.Suggested Read 📖 These Linux Distros Can Run on Apple Silicon Mac
Why this license change matters
For clarification, Asahi’s progress report does not mention Aurora Silicon or Gravity Linux by name. I have provided their conflict with Asahi as context.Pay once, Enjoy forever
Will the GPL actually help?
Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed.
Asahi is betting that copyleft license provides a better defense in this changed world where anyone can launder code with a prompt.
There have been at least two public forks of Asahi’s work in recent months, both tied to AI-assisted development. In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution. The MIT license only asks you to keep the original copyright notice. It doesn’t require you to share your changes or keep your version open. That’s what makes it popular, and it’s also what made things problematic for Asahi here.
“Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of “defending against AI bad actors”, seems entirely disingenuous and misguided.”
Asahi didn’t name anyone in the report. It also didn’t spell out how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor agreed to it. — Bryan Steele 🦋 (@canadianbryan) November 7, 2026
Wrapping up
📋To be fair to Gravity, it is open source, it isn’t selling anything, and it credits its AI use openly. It even says it plans to sunset the distro once its driver work lands upstream. The second is Gravity Linux, a Fedora-based distro for Apple Silicon. It was forked from Asahi over the disagreement about LLM use. Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can’t legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product’s source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot.
LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course.
This is because people were taking in-development code straight out of their personal forks, publishing it without credit, or rewriting it with AI to hide its origin for “replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.”
Go lifetime
What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi’s code, close it up, and sell a product, and that’s perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.
Set as preferred source
