The Odoo Community Association (OCA) has published a new AI Policy, effective immediately, that sets out how artificial intelligence may and may not be used when contributing to its shared open source code. The OCA says it acted after seeing contribution patterns it calls unsustainable, including large volumes of reviews arriving in very short periods. In one case 25 pull request reviews arrived within a single hour, and elsewhere a month's worth of review activity landed in a couple of days. That volume, it says, leaves other volunteers to spend time and energy responding, beyond what the team can manage at its expected standard of quality.
Human responsibility is absolute
The policy accepts that AI can help produce code, but it draws a firm line. The interaction with the ecosystem, meaning review, discussion, judgement and accountability, must be human. The OCA notes that the legal questions around AI and copyright remain unresolved, and it takes no position on authorship. Its position on responsibility, however, is described as absolute: the human contributor is fully responsible for their contribution, however it was produced. As the policy puts it, AI is not intelligent. A human instructs, connects, installs and directs it, and that human is held to account.
What the policy requires
The OCA sets out concrete rules for contributors:
- Every contribution must come from a human who understands it and takes full responsibility for it.
- Any AI involvement in authoring means the contribution should include an Assisted-by: trailer. The OCA treats this as binary, with no threshold to judge.
- AI tools must never be listed in Co-authored-by:.
- Unsupervised agentic tools are not permitted.
- If you cannot explain and defend every line, do not submit it.
- During review, engage with feedback rather than simply regenerating and resubmitting. "The AI wrote it" is not a valid answer.
- When reviewing, do not post AI-generated review comments or summaries without fact-checking them yourself.
Consequences for breaching the policy range from rejection of a contribution, to being blocked until the contributor speaks with the Governance Working Group, up to a permanent ban for bot-like behaviour. The full text is available in the OCA's GitHub repository and pull request, and the OCA has proposed an open Governance Working Group meeting to gather feedback, noting that it expects the policy to change over time.
For teams building on Odoo, it is a clear reference point on where AI can assist and where a human must stay accountable.