LLM Spam Is Closing Open Source Projects to Contributors

The flood of low-quality AI-generated pull requests is forcing open source maintainers to abandon openness—some are restricting contributions to vetted developers only or moving entirely off GitHub. This erodes the meritocratic access model that built the modern software stack, replacing it with gatekeeping that will slow innovation in smaller projects while concentrating power among well-resourced maintainers. The irony: LLMs depend on open source code for training and deployment, yet their proliferation is making that commons harder to sustain.