A new study published in Science has revealed that AI-assisted coding is on the rise, and growing quickly. AI usage is highest among less experienced programmers but is also being used by experienced prgrammers.
The spread is geographical too, in the US the share of new code relying on AI rose from 5% in 2022 to 29% in early 2025, compared with just 12% in China.
In a study published in Science, a research team led by the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) found that by the end of 2024, around one-third of all newly written software functions in the US were already being created with the support of AI systems.
“We analysed more than 30 million Python contributions from roughly 160,000 developers on GitHub, the world’s largest collaborative programming platform,” says Simone Daniotti of CSH and Utrecht University. GitHub records every step of coding – additions, edits, improvements – allowing researchers to track programming work across the globe in real time. Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world.
“While the share of AI-supported code is highest in the U.S. at 29%, Germany reaches 23% and France 24%, followed by India at 20%, which has been catching up fast,” he says, while Russia (15%) and China (12%) still lagged behind at the end of the study.
“It's no surprise the US leads, that's where the leading LLMs come from. Users in China and Russia have faced barriers to accessing these models, blocked by their own governments or by the providers themselves, though VPN workarounds exist. Recent domestic Chinese breakthroughs like DeepSeek, released after our data ends in early 2025, suggest this gap may close quickly,” says Johannes Wachs, a faculty member at CSH and associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest.
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