Anthropic says its leak-focused DMCA effort unintentionally hit legit GitHub forks

In a recent incident, a DMCA action initiated by Anthropic aimed at removing its leaked Claude Code client source code from GitHub inadvertently led to the removal of numerous legitimate forks of its public code repository. Although this aggressive takedown has since been reversed, Anthropic continues to grapple with the challenges of containing the distribution of its leaked code. The takedown notice that GitHub received on Tuesday specifically targeted a repository that housed the leaked source code posted by GitHub user nirholas. This action also included nearly 100 named forks of that repository. However, GitHub later clarified that it had taken down a wider network of approximately 8,100 forked repositories, based on the submitter’s claim that many of these forks infringed similarly to the original repository. This broad action adversely affected several repositories that did not contain any leaked code but were simply forks of Anthropic’s official Claude Code repository, which the company had made available for public bug reports and fixes. Many developers expressed their frustration on social media, highlighting their innocence in the situation. One developer, Robert McLaws, remarked, “I’m sorry that your people shipped your source code, and that your lawyers don’t know how to read a repo. I will be filing a DMCA counter-notice.” By Wednesday, Anthropic had taken steps to address the issue with GitHub, requesting the platform to limit its takedown actions to just the 96 specific fork URLs mentioned in their notice and to restore all other repositories that had been affected by the sweeping takedown. Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, acknowledged on social media that the extensive takedowns were “not intentional,” while Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic described the situation as stemming from “a communication mistake.”