Explore GitHub’s latest transparency data and learn more about policy updates affecting developers and open source.
Key takeaways
GitHub has released its latest transparency data, showing a sharp increase in government takedown requests, and has been active on state policy issues such as age assurance and content provenance.
- GitHub received 708 government takedown requests in the first half of 2026, up from 98 in all of 2025.
- The increase in requests is due to changes in reporting methodology, not an increase in content removals.
- GitHub has been working on state policy issues such as age assurance and content provenance, including the California AI Transparency Act and the Digital Age Assurance Act.
- GitHub will continue to engage with policymakers and stakeholders on these issues to address implementation challenges and unintended impacts on open source software and developer infrastructure.
Summarised automatically by AI from the original article by The GitHub Blog. AI can make mistakes, so check the original for details.
Policy decisions increasingly shape how developers build, collaborate, and participate in open source. That makes it important not only to be transparent about how GitHub responds to government requests, but also to help developers understand policy proposals that could affect their work and create opportunities for the open source community to engage.
With that in mind, we’re sharing our latest Transparency Center data, looking back at an unusually active 2026 state legislative session, and highlighting a few policy conversations we’ll be following in the months ahead.
Updating how we report government takedown requests
One notable change in our H1 2026 Transparency Center data is a sharp increase in government takedown requests received, from 98 requests in all of 2025 to 708 requests in the first half of 2026 alone. This increase largely reflects changes to our reporting methodology rather than a change in our moderation practices.
