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

Anthropic accidentally caused thousands of code repositories on GitHub to be taken down while trying to pull copies of its most popular product’s source code off the internet.

Leaked Claude Code Source Code

On Tuesday, a software engineer discovered that Anthropic had, seemingly by accident, included access to the source code for the category-leading Claude Code command line application in a recent release. AI enthusiasts examined the leaked code for clues about how Anthropic harnesses the large language model underlying the application and began sharing it on GitHub.

Mass Takedown Notices

Anthropic issued a takedown notice under U.S. digital copyright law asking GitHub to remove repositories containing the code. According to GitHub’s records, the notice was executed against approximately 8,100 repositories — including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s own publicly released Claude Code repository, according to social media users whose code was blocked.

Company Response and Retraction

Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said the move was accidental and retracted the bulk of the takedown notices, limiting enforcement to one repository and 96 forks that contained the accidentally released source code.

“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,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We retracted the notice for everything except the one repo we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks.”

Reputational Impact

The botched cleanup is another black eye for the company as it reportedly plans an IPO, a process that typically demands close attention to execution and compliance.