Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, has accidentally caused the takedown of thousands of legitimate code repositories on the Microsoft-owned platform GitHub. The incident occurred on Tuesday when the company attempted to remove leaked source code for its popular Claude Code command line application from the internet.
The leak was discovered by a software engineer who found that a recent release of Claude Code inadvertently included access to its underlying source code. AI enthusiasts quickly analysed the code for insights into how Anthropic harnesses the large language model (LLM) powering the application, sharing copies across GitHub.
Overbroad Copyright Claim
In response, Anthropic issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice to GitHub, requesting the removal of repositories containing the proprietary code. According to GitHub's records, this legal notice was executed against approximately 8,100 repositories. This sweeping action included legitimate forks of Anthropic's own publicly released Claude Code repository, according to angry developers who found their projects blocked.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, stated the move was accidental. The company subsequently retracted the bulk of the takedown notices, limiting the action to one primary repository and 96 of its forks that contained the accidentally released source code.
Company Explanation and Restoration
"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."
This botched clean-up operation represents another reputational setback for Anthropic as the company reportedly prepares for an initial public offering (IPO). Such a transition typically demands meticulous attention to operational execution and regulatory compliance.
Broader Implications
The incident highlights the potential collateral damage of aggressive intellectual property enforcement in the open-source software ecosystem. For a company on the path to becoming a publicly traded entity, accidentally leaking core source code and then mishandling its retrieval could expose it to significant legal and financial risks, including potential shareholder litigation.
GitHub has since restored access to the thousands of repositories wrongly targeted. The platform's automated systems for processing DMCA notices are designed to act swiftly on copyright claims, a process that can sometimes ensnare legitimate projects within large fork networks, as occurred in this case.