Detecting AI Coding Agents in Open Source: A Validated Multi-Method Census of 180 Million Repositories
Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so si...
| Authors | Arsham Khosravani, Audris Mockus |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 23 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 June 2026 |
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