GitHub’s policy update reports that government takedown requests to the platform rose from 98 in all of 2025 to 708 in the first half of 2026 after a reporting-methodology change that counts every request received, then reviews how the 2026 U.S. state legislative session affected open source. It says sustained engagement from the open source community reshaped California’s AI Transparency Act (SB 1000) so that it dropped a provision requiring providers to revoke licenses, a requirement it describes as fundamentally incompatible with widely used irrevocable open source licenses, while warning that definitions in California’s AB 853 and AB 2713 could still be read to cover code repositories and other developer infrastructure.
Developer policy update: Transparency, state policy, and what’s ahead
GitHub's policy update reports that government takedown requests to the platform rose from 98 in all of 2025 to 708 in the first half of 2026 after a reporting-methodology change that counts every request received, then reviews how the 2026 U.S. state legislative session affected open source. It says sustained engagement from the open source community reshaped California's AI Transparency Act (SB 1000) so that it dropped a provision requiring providers to revoke licenses, a requirement it describes as fundamentally incompatible with widely used irrevocable open source licenses, while warning that definitions in California's AB 853 and AB 2713 could still be read to cover code repositories and other developer infrastructure.
Source: GitHub Blog