Developer policy update: Transparency, state policy, and what’s ahead

Policy decisions increasingly shape how developers build, collaborate, and participate in open source. That makes it important not only to be transparent about how GitHub responds to government requests, but also to help developers understand policy proposals that could affect their work and create opportunities for the open source community to engage.

With that in mind, we’re sharing our latest Transparency Center data, looking back at an unusually active 2026 state legislative session, and highlighting a few policy conversations we’ll be following in the months ahead.

Updating how we report government takedown requests

One notable change in our H1 2026 Transparency Center data is a sharp increase in government takedown requests received, from 98 requests in all of 2025 to 708 requests in the first half of 2026 alone. This increase largely reflects changes to our reporting methodology rather than a change in our moderation practices.

As we noted in our H1 2025 update, we expanded our reporting to include …