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

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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