Anthropic took down thousands of Github repos trying to yank its leaked source code — a move the company says was an accident

In a surprising turn of events, Anthropic found itself at the center of controversy after inadvertently causing the removal of thousands of GitHub repositories. This mishap occurred as the company attempted to excise unauthorized copies of the source code for its flagship product, the Claude Code command line application. The issue came to light when a software engineer noticed that Anthropic had mistakenly embedded access to the source code in a recent software release. This oversight allowed eager AI enthusiasts to dissect the leaked code, leading to its spread across GitHub. In response, Anthropic issued a takedown notice under U.S. digital copyright law, requesting GitHub to eliminate repositories that contained the leaked material. According to GitHub’s documentation, this notice impacted approximately 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of Anthropic's own public Claude Code repository. Many developers expressed their frustration on social media, highlighting the unintended consequences of Anthropic’s actions. Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, clarified that the extensive takedown was not intentional. The company has since retracted most of the takedown notices, narrowing it down to just one repository and 96 related forks that contained the mistakenly released code. An Anthropic spokesperson explained, "The repo named in the notice was part of a fork network connected to our own public Claude Code repo, so the takedown reached more repositories than intended. We retracted the notice for everything except the one repo we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks." This incident adds to the challenges faced by Anthropic as it gears up for a potential IPO, a process that typically requires meticulous attention to detail and adherence to compliance standards. The revelation of leaked source code could potentially raise concerns among shareholders, suggesting that legal repercussions may be on the horizon for the company.