Anthropic accidentally caused thousands of code repositories on GitHub to be deleted by attempting to pull copies of the source code of its most popular product from the Internet.
On Tuesday, a software engineer discovered that Anthropic, apparently by accident, including access to source code for the category-leading Claude Code command line application in a recent release. AI enthusiasts pored over the leaked code for clues about how Anthropic leverages the LLM underlying the app and shares it on GitHub.
Anthropic issued a takedown notice under US digital copyright law asking GitHub to remove repositories containing the infringing code. According to GitHub filesThe notice ran on about 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s own publicly published Claude Code repository, according to angry social networks users whose code was blocked.
Anthropic’s Claude Code director Boris Cherny saying the move was accidental and retracted most of the takedown notices, limiting them to one repository and 96 forks with accidentally released source code.
“The repository mentioned in the notice was part of a forked network connected to our own public Claude Code repository, so the removal reached more repositories than anticipated,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We retracted the notice for everything except the repository we named, and GitHub restored access to the affected forks.”
The botched cleanup here is another black eye for the company as it reportedly plans an IPO, a task that typically requires attention to execution and compliance. Leaking your source code as a public company? You better believe a shareholder lawsuit is coming.
