GitHub logs 708 government takedown requests in the first half of 2026

GitHub received 708 government takedown requests in the first half of 2026, up from 98 across the whole of 2025. The company's own explanation for that jump is less alarming than the figure looks: it changed how it counts.

What's actually going on

GitHub now reports every government takedown request it receives, whether the request cites local law, a breach of its Terms of Service or simply asks for content to be removed, and it counts duplicates that concern the same material. Because of that, GitHub says the higher number reflects the volume of government reporting activity rather than a matching rise in removals.

Takedowns actually actioned under local law or for Terms of Service violations remain rare, and requests involving content judged unlawful in a particular jurisdiction continue to be published in GitHub's government takedowns repository. The transparency figures and the policy lobbying arrived in the same update, which is notable in itself: GitHub is increasingly arguing that developer infrastructure should not be regulated as if it were a consumer platform.

The state bills that mattered

The most significant result was in California. The AI Transparency Act, SB 1000 and previously SB 942, is intended to help people work out whether digital content was created or altered by AI. Earlier drafts would have required providers to revoke licences in certain circumstances, a condition incompatible with the irrevocable licences most open-source projects use. After engagement from GitHub and the wider open-source community the bill moved to a narrower notice-and-response model. SB 1000 was enrolled on 30 August and, at the time of writing, is awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom's signature by 30 September.

A follow-up bill, AB 2713, would refine how the Act's content provenance duties apply in practice, particularly to platforms. Its underlying law, AB 853, defines large online platform, file-sharing platform and generative AI hosting platform in terms broad enough to be read as covering developer infrastructure such as code repositories. GitHub argues that reading does not match the regulatory intent and would create legal uncertainty for open-source infrastructure without addressing the risks the Act targets.

Age assurance was the other theme. In California, GitHub pushed for the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB 1043, to avoid sweeping in open-source operating systems and developer tools that are not consumer-facing services. In Colorado, changes to the Age Attestation on Computing Devices law, SB 26, addressed several of those concerns. Illinois signed its Children's Social Media Safety Act, HB 5511, with issues still outstanding.

What GitHub is watching next

The next battleground is the DMCA Section 1201 triennial rulemaking, the process that grants temporary exemptions letting developers and researchers bypass technical protection measures for lawful work. The current proceeding includes petitions on free and open-source licence-compliance investigations, scholarly text and data mining, and renewal of the good-faith security research exemption GitHub has supported before. GitHub also wants policymakers debating young people's access to AI tools to separate consumer-facing chatbots from tools used to learn, create and build software.

Our opinion

The 708 figure will be quoted out of context for months, and GitHub has been unusually plain that its own counting change produced most of it, which is the right way to publish a bad-looking number. The more consequential detail sits further down: a licence-revocation clause that would have been unworkable for open source was quietly replaced with notice-and-response before the bill reached the governor's desk. That is what effective developer advocacy looks like, and it is a useful reminder that the interesting part of a transparency report is rarely the number in the headline. The unresolved risk is AB 2713, because if code repositories are treated as platforms, the compliance burden lands on the maintainers who can least afford it.