Anthropic accidentally took down thousands of code repositories on GitHub while trying to get copies of the source code of the most popular products on the Internet.
On Tuesday, a software engineer accidentally discovered that Anthropic had included access to the source code of its category-leading Claude Code command-line application in a recent release. AI enthusiasts have been digging through the leaked code and sharing it on GitHub for clues about how Anthropic leverages the LLM that underpins the application.
Anthropic issued a takedown notice under the U.S. Digital Copyright Act asking GitHub to remove the repository containing the problematic code. According to records from GitHub, notices have been issued to approximately 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of the Claude Code repository that Anthropic released publicly, according to angry social media users whose code was blocked.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said the move was accidental and that the majority of the takedown notices had been withdrawn, limiting them to one repository and 96 forks whose source code had been inadvertently made public.
“The repositories named in the announcement were part of a fork network connected to our public Claude Code repository, so the takedown reached more repositories than intended,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We have withdrawn notices for all but one repository we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks.”
A mismanagement here is another black eye for the company as it is said to be planning an IPO, a task that would normally require careful attention to execution and compliance. As a public company, do you leak source code? You better believe a shareholder lawsuit is coming.
