A new arXiv paper published on June 23, 2026 scanned more than 180 million Git repositories to detect traces of AI coding agents in open source. The authors used multiple signals, including configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup.
The most useful result for developers is the visibility gap.
In one snapshot, multi-method detection found 850,157 Claude Code commits.
Bot-account lookup found only 28,154.
That is 3.3%, or a 30x relative recall gap.
