Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

AI agents can now autonomously plan changes, edit code, and submit pull requests — but open-source infrastructure was built around the assumption of a legally accountable human contributor who can attest to provenance and answer reviewers' questions. This paper systematically maps how six major open-source organizations (including Apache, Linux Foundation, and SymPy) have responded with contribution policies, then scores them against EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and ISO frameworks. The result reveals fragmented, partially overlapping gaps that neither open-source policy nor AI regulation currently closes. Applications of this work include informing standardized AI contribution policies, guiding platform-level governance decisions at GitHub and GitLab, and shaping emerging regulatory frameworks for autonomous software agents. Authors: Jassem Manita, Aziz Amari Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14594v1