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.

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 pored over the leaked code for clues about how Anthropic harnesses the LLM that underlies the application, sharing it on GitHub.

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

Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said the move was accidental and retracted the bulk of the takedown notices, limiting it to one repository and 96 forks with 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.”

The botched clean-up here is another black eye for the company as it reportedly plans an IPO, a task which typically demands attention to execution and compliance. Leaking your source code as a public company? You better believe there’s a shareholder lawsuit coming.