GitHub is weighing disabling or restricting pull requests after maintainers reported being flooded with AI-generated, low-quality submissions that are exhausting reviewers and threatening open-source sustainability.
GitHub has formally acknowledged that AI-generated “slop” is overwhelming open-source projects, forcing maintainers to sift through poor pull requests, abandoned submissions and guideline violations — and is now considering restricting or even disabling pull requests, the core mechanism of open collaboration.
The Microsoft-owned platform is evaluating drastic measures, including turning off pull requests entirely, limiting them to trusted collaborators, deleting unwanted PRs from view, adding granular permissions, deploying AI triage tools, and introducing attribution to signal AI use — steps that could fundamentally reshape how open source functions.
Camilla Moraes, Product Manager at GitHub, called it “a critical issue affecting the open source community: the increasing volume of low-quality contributions that is creating significant operational challenges for maintainers.”
“We’ve been hearing from you that you’re dedicating substantial time to reviewing contributions that do not meet project quality standards… and are often AI-generated,” she said, adding GitHub is “actively investigating this problem and developing both immediate and longer-term strategic solutions.”
The scale is stark. Xavier Portilla Edo, Head of Cloud Infrastructure at Voiceflow and part of the Genkit core team, said “1 out of 10 PRs created with AI is legitimate and meets the standards required to open that PR.”
Maintainers warn the review burden is becoming untenable. Jiaxiao (Joe) Zhou of Microsoft’s Azure Container Upstream team said AI code makes today’s “line-by-line understanding” model “increasingly unsustainable.”
Nathan Brake of Mozilla.ai cautioned that “much of open source is really at risk,” while GoCD maintainer Chad Wilson described reviewing AI work as “plausible nonsense” and warned of “a huge erosion of social trust.”
Ironically, GitHub, which popularised AI coding with Copilot, now faces AI threatening the openness that built its community.
