Subject: BCP 78 policy / copyright / Generative AI / LLM .. is there a FAQ?
From: Job Snijders <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:50:31 +0000
List-Id: "IETF-Discussion. This is the most general IETF mailing list, intended for discussion of technical, procedural, operational, and other topics for which no dedicated mailing lists exist." <ietf.ietf.org>

Dear all,

The IETF is committed to making all text available with a permissive
license and with appropriate attribution. A fantastic objective I
wholeheartedly support. As I understand things, generative AI/LLMs, by
their nature, are likely unable to provide the necessary assurances that
the generated material is compatible with the provisions of BCP 78
(RFC5378) or that the original authors are properly attributed.

I can see that AI tooling is helping some folks with study & analysis,
(which is great for them!), however I am not sure that submitting an
internet-draft to the IETF that was (partially) generated using AI would
be a wise path to follow: I recently spotted someone who contemplated
submitting a 33,000+ word LLM-generated I-D for review to a working
group. The machine certainly was not a subject matter expert - but at
first glance it all looked legit, if such submissions were to happen
they'd have the potential to take up a lot of time resources.

I personally would recommend working groups against adoption of AI
generated text (mostly because of the potential for issues related to
intellectual property). IMHO, handwritten originals are the way to go
when using the IETF publication venue! :)

The FreeBSD project recently added some clarifications,
result: https://reviews.freebsd.org/differential/changeset/?ref=1420532
discussion: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D50650?id=156417

Other entities also provided documentation on the topic:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai
https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

Is it documented somewhere for IETF newcomers that internet-draft
submissions should not contain LLM/AI generated text? I imagine that
similar clarifications for the IETF context along the lines of "text
_about_ AI is fine, but text generated by AI has legal implications"
would be very helpful.

Where can I point newcomers on this topic?

Kind regards,

Job