I think you cannot find any because the Linux kernel itself has AI assisted development happening. Distros that use the kernel then cannot say “No AI.”

Edit: Gentoo and NetBSD specifically do not allow AI generated code.

Likely because at this point, it’s an almost impossible standard to hold for an open source project.

“AI code” is a very vague term. What if somebody used an LLM autocomplete in their IDE? What if they used an LLM to summarize and parse documentation, but wrote all the code themself? What if they generated the initial code with an LLM, but then heavily modified and tuned it by hand? What if they wrote the initial code by hand, but used an LLM to debug or optimize it? What if they wrote all the code by themself, but used an LLM to write unit tests and modify documentation?

If you’re against every single example I gave, that’s fine, but many if not most of these would be nearly impossible to tell if somebody had done it. Project maintainers are already spread extremely thin without also having to be AI detectives. Many/most large projects have already banned AI slop contributions, but that only stops the most obvious and lowest quality vibe coders and agentic bot spam.

The truth is that a large portion of devs are using LLMs in the kinds of ways I described earlier, right, wrong, or otherwise. Some distros are leaning into the hype, others are just quietly doing their own thing.

If you want to steer clear of explicit AI inclusion, I would just stick with distros that aren’t bragging about implimenting those kinds of features. Check their main project page, check their official blog if they have one, look at the lead maintainers’ github/lab pages and projects and see if they are big into AI stuff or not.

At this point, that’s probably the best you can do.

If you are ok with Ubuntu in general, excluding the AI part, go upstream and get Debian. It’s primarily mandate is stability which, to me at least, means no AI integration from the standard install.

https://secureblue.dev/contributing#ai-content

In the interest of accuracy, quality, and license of the project, contributing using AI generated code and content of any kind is forbidden.

Hop on Arch.

See the other comment about the kernel, but that aside you could go down the https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ route

Simply saying “No AI” would forbid a huge amount of code that was written with assistive technologies that long precede the latest crop of proprietary LLMs; I’d venture it would cover almost all software in distributions for the past several decades.

“AI” is a marketing term, in continuous use from the mid-twentieth century to encompass a broad and ever-changing range of automation and other tools, that is deliberately vague. If we want to be clear what the ban does and does not cover, we need to avoid that term.

And then of course we can deliberate on exactly what is permitted (code that was auto-corrected by a spell checker? code that had its boilerplate syntax automatically generated?) versus what is forbidden (code that was generated in some proprietary data centre? code that is an unattributable, non-consensual remix of existing code? code that was probabilistically extruded from an LLM?), because we’ll avoid the useless term “AI” and instead speak of specific tools and technologies.

I feel that and I hope we get there one day, but for now it might be better to stick with a distro that has a proven track record of good maintainers properly reviewing code. You’re searching for a daily driver for your machine, right? Or is it a more specialized use case?

No linux distro advertises as “AI-free” because that’s a bit like saying a burger is uranium-free

I can make one for you, won’t have any mistakes, just give me few hours

Debian? Fedora? Bazzite?

If it ever got to the point that all distros had in-your-face-AI I’ll turn my Pixel/GrapheneOS phone into a “desktop” computer. Just have to connect a hub, monitor, keyboard and mouse and take advantage of the pass-through charging.