Opt-out Ledger / US Tech Automations

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Free guide · The Stack

Am I in The Stack? How to check and opt out

The Stack is a huge open collection of code from GitHub, built to train AI models. You can check for free whether your code is in it, and ask for it to be removed by filing a public request. This guide shows each step, as the project describes them on 2026-10-02.

Cost to check
Free
Cost to opt out
Free
Facts checked on
2026-10-02
Paid tool
Opt-out Ledger, $49 per monthly edition

Get the dated list: Opt-out Ledger, $49

The short answer

Type your GitHub username into the free “Am I in The Stack?” page. It shows what of yours is in the dataset and can fill in an opt-out request for you. The request is a public GitHub issue, and it costs nothing.

Nobody here can promise what happens next. The project says repositories that opted out are removed from the dataset before each patch release, and that opting out excludes your code from the next iteration and from current and future model training. That is their statement, not ours.

What The Stack is

The current release is called The Stack v3. Its dataset card calls it “the largest, most up-to-date open dataset of source code”, crawled directly from GitHub and built to pre-train code models. The training part of it holds code in 713 programming languages from 173M repositories. The card says it reflects the state of GitHub in August 2025.

It follows two earlier versions, The Stack v1 and The Stack v2. This guide covers the opt-out process the project currently points to.

The steps

  1. Check. Open the “Am I in The Stack?” page (linked in the sources below). Enter your GitHub username, or the name of an organization you own.
  2. Look at what is listed. The project says the page shows what is in the dataset and lets you pick what to remove.
  3. Decide how much to remove. The request form has two lists, and you fill in at least one. One list is for whole accounts and organizations, one name per line. The project says everything under each is removed, now and in the future. The other list is for specific repositories, written as owner/repo, one per line. Only those are removed, and everything else under that owner stays. List as many as you like, including old usernames and organizations.
  4. File the request. The page generates a pre-filled issue in the public repository bigcode-project/opt-out-v2. When we followed the new-issue link without being signed in, GitHub sent us to its sign-in page, so expect to need a GitHub account.
  5. Optional extras. You can say whether you own, maintain or contributed to what you listed, and add a proof link. The project says these are optional, and that it will follow up if it needs to check.

What people have actually filed

We keep a dated copy of the public requests. In our first edition, built on 2026-10-01 from requests filed up to 2026-09-30, we read 8,259 issues. We could read 8,130 of them and could not read 129. The earliest readable one was filed on 2023-03-29 and the latest on 2026-09-30.

The four busiest months for readable requests in our first edition. Every other month had fewer than 100.
Month filedRequests
March 20241,921
July 20264,632
August 2026650
September 2026558

Of the 8,130, 5,085 ask for a whole account to be removed, 3,555 list specific repositories, and 510 do both. Together they name 62,584 things to remove. Of the 8,130, 8,095 are marked closed on GitHub and 35 are open. These are counts of requests filed. They do not show that anything was removed, and a closed issue is not proof of removal.

The free ways

Everything in the steps above is free. The “Am I in The Stack?” page is free to use, and so is filing the request. The requests sit in a public repository, so you can read any of them for free on GitHub, including your own after you file it.

If you only want to opt yourself out, you do not need anything else. Stop here and use the steps.

Where our tool fits, and what it cannot do

Opt-out Ledger is for a different job. If your team holds a downloaded copy of The Stack, it gives you a spreadsheet of the opt-out requests filed in bigcode-project/opt-out-v2, cleaned up and dated. It also gives you a script that removes those repositories from your local copy and writes a report of what it removed. The script never changes your original files. It is $49 per monthly edition. You can open a free excerpt first: 100 of the 62,584 rows of the current edition.

It cannot file a request for you, and it does not say any request is valid, that a licence is revoked, or that a model forgot anything. It covers requests filed in that one repository only. This guide and the tool are not legal advice, and we are not affiliated with the BigCode project or Hugging Face.

Sources