Satya Nadella says AI agents now open over 40% of GitHub pull requests

GitHub's Octoverse 2026 data shows agent-driven pull requests hit 110 million in September as autonomous coding goes mainstream Software has a new most prolific contributor, and it doesn’t take lunch breaks. AI agents opened more than 40% of all pull requests on GitHub in September, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed. That works out to 110 million pull requests in a single month. It is about six times the figure from March, which means the bots didn’t just show up. They took over a meaningful chunk of the workflow in roughly half a year. What the numbers actually say Nadella shared the data during a presentation at the Universe conference on October 28, 2026. The figures come from GitHub’s Octoverse 2026 report, the platform’s annual check-up on how developers build software. First, some vocabulary. A pull request is a proposed change to a codebase, submitted for review before it gets merged in. Think of it as a tracked-changes Word document sent to an editor, except the editor is a senior engineer and the document is your company’s product. In March 2026, agents accounted for 17% of those proposals. By September, they were behind more than 40%. The share more than doubled in abo...