SmartBear: 46% of Teams Shipped Failed AI Code
Nearly half of American and British engineering teams have shipped AI-written code that later failed in production. Ask those same teams whether they trust AI-written code, and most say yes. Not a grudging yes — a lot or complete confidence, in the words of the survey itself. That is the headline finding from SmartBear's 2026 State of Software Quality and Testing report, announced September 30, 2026, and it is one of the strangest numbers in enterprise software this year: 46% of teams have watched AI-generated code break in production, and 69% of those teams are still highly confident it behaves as intended. You would expect those numbers to move in opposite directions. They don't. Update, Sept. 30 SmartBear's companion "Closing the AI Software Quality Gap" report adds scale context the press release skipped — 93% of respondents have adopted AI coding tools; 40% now generate 41%+ of their code with AI, a share expected to hit 60% within 12 months; 70% are co...