Korea is emerging as a global hub for AI development, driven by a rise in the number of developers and increased open source contributions.

According to the '2025 Octoverse Report' published by GitHub, the world's largest AI developer platform, the number of developers in Korea has surpassed 2.66 million, recording the highest growth rate ever.

Over the past 12 months, 450,000 new developers have joined GitHub, a 20% increase over the previous year.

This growth demonstrates the expanding global influence of the Korean developer community alongside the proliferation of AI technology. Korea has established itself as a leader in global software innovation, ranking 11th in the number of open source contributors, 6th in contribution activity, and 6th in contributions to AI-related repositories.

“The rapid growth of the Korean developer community is clear evidence that AI is expanding the scope, speed, and breadth of developers’ work,” said Sherin Napier, Vice President of GitHub Asia Pacific. “The emergence of agentic AI has started a wave of intelligent innovation, and Korea is actively embracing it, promoting innovation across industries.”

Major domestic companies are also accelerating the adoption of AI-based development tools. KT, Kakao, and LG Electronics are adopting GitHub Copilot to improve developer productivity, accelerating the spread of AI-based workflows.

GitHub announced that 36 million new developers joined its platform over the past year. This equates to more than one developer joining GitHub every second, bringing the global developer base to over 180 million. In particular, Copilot Free, launched in late 2024, has brought millions of new developers into its AI-powered development environment. Eighty percent of new signups used Copilot within the first week, demonstrating that AI is becoming the new standard in development.

2025 was the most active year in GitHub's history. Contributions to public and open source projects exceeded 1.12 billion, with 5.5 million issues resolved in July alone. The average monthly pull request (PR) reached 43.2 million, a 23% increase year-over-year, and the total number of commits pushed reached 1 billion.

As AI experiments enter production, the use of Jupyter Notebooks (+75%) and Dockerfiles (+120%) also surged. This suggests that developers are focusing on implementing AI projects into real-world services.

TypeScript was the most used programming language in 2025. Its contributor count grew by over one million, a 66% increase year-over-year, marking the largest language transition in a decade. The trend toward strict type systems and AI-assisted development efficiency drove TypeScript's adoption.

Python remains a key language in the AI field, with contributors reaching 2.6 million, a 49% increase year-over-year. More than half of new AI projects are developed using Python.

Of the top 10 open source projects on GitHub, 60% are AI-focused, demonstrating that community-driven development is the foundation of the AI ecosystem. AI and automation are also playing a significant role in security. The average time to fix a major vulnerability has decreased from 37 days to 26 days, and the adoption rate of Defenderbot has increased by 137%, reaching 846,000 repositories.

Copilot Autofix automatically resolves issues like "access control errors" in over 6,000 repositories each month, and the number of repositories with critical security alerts has decreased by 26% year-over-year. This demonstrates that AI and automation are effectively strengthening software security.