AI Policy#
“AI” herein refers to generative AI tools like large language models (LLMs) that can generate, edit, and review software code, create and manipulate images, or generate human-like communication.
Responsibility#
You are responsible for any code you submit to NumPy’s repositories, regardless of whether it was manually written or generated by AI. You must understand and be able to explain the code you submit as well as the existing related code. It is not acceptable to submit a patch that you cannot understand and explain yourself. In explaining your contribution, do not use AI to automatically generate comments, pull request descriptions, or issue descriptions. See below for our policy on AI translation systems.
Disclosure#
You must disclose whether AI has been used to assist in the development of your pull request. If so, you must document which tool(s) have been used, how they were used, and specify what code or text is AI generated. We will reject any pull request that does not include the disclosure.
Code Quality#
Contributors are expected to submit code that meets NumPy’s standards. We will reject pull requests that we deem to be “AI slop”. Do not waste developers’ time by submitting code that is fully or mostly generated by AI, and doesn’t meet our standards.
Copyright#
All code in NumPy is released under the BSD 3-clause copyright license. Contributors to NumPy license their code under the same license when it is included in NumPy’s version control repository. That means contributors must own the copyright of any code submitted to NumPy or must include the BSD 3-clause compatible open source license(s) associated with the submitted code in the patch. Code generated by AI may infringe on copyright and it is the submitter’s responsibility to not infringe. We reserve the right to reject any pull requests, AI-generated or not, where the copyright is in question.
Communication#
When interacting with developers (forums, discussions, issues, pull requests, etc.) do not use AI to speak for you, except for translation or grammar editing. If the developers want to chat with a chatbot, they can do so themselves. Human-to-human communication is essential for an open source community to thrive.
AI Agents#
The use of an AI agent that writes code and then submits a pull request autonomously is not permitted. A human must check any generated code and submit a pull request according to the ‘Responsibility’ section above.
Other Resources#
While these do not formally form part of NumPy’s AI policy, the following resources may be helpful in understanding some pitfalls associated with using AI to contribute to NumPy:
Acknowledgements#
We thank the SciPy developers for their AI policy, upon which this document is largely based.