95% of OpenAPI projects lack breaking-change detection, but most disclose changes manually

A scan of 1,939 GitHub repositories identified 85 projects publishing genuine first-party OpenAPI specifications, and found that only four had any automated breaking-change detection in their CI pipelines. Researchers then analyzed up to ten consecutive releases per project, uncovering 2,118 breaking changes across 60 repositories, of which 631 were directly consumer-visible. Contrary to expectations, 12 of the 18 projects that shipped consumer-visible breaking changes disclosed them clearly in release notes, often with migration guides. Only 14 releases across the entire dataset contained undisclosed consumer-visible breaks, making the silent-breakage problem significantly smaller than initially assumed. The study concludes that while the tooling gap is real, most open-source API maintainers are communicating breaking changes manually rather than silently shipping them.