Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, inadvertently triggered the removal of thousands of code repositories on GitHub while attempting to purge copies of its most popular product's source code from the internet.
The incident began on Tuesday when a software engineer discovered that Anthropic had, seemingly by mistake, included access to the source code for its leading Claude Code command line application in a recent software release. This accidental disclosure quickly led AI enthusiasts to delve into the leaked code for insights into how Anthropic leverages the underlying Large Language Model (LLM), subsequently sharing it across GitHub.
In response, Anthropic issued a takedown notice under U.S. digital copyright law, requesting GitHub to remove repositories containing the unauthorized code. According to GitHub's records, this notice was executed against approximately 8,100 repositories. This extensive action inadvertently affected legitimate forks of Anthropic's own publicly released Claude Code repository, as reported by frustrated social media users whose projects were consequently blocked.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, confirmed the takedown was an error. He stated that the majority of the notices were subsequently retracted, narrowing the scope to target only one specific repository and 96 associated forks that contained the inadvertently released source code.
An Anthropic spokesperson elaborated to TechCrunch, explaining, "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." The spokesperson further confirmed, "We retracted the notice for everything except the one repo we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks."
This mishandled clean-up operation represents a significant setback for Anthropic, particularly as the company is reportedly preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). An IPO process inherently demands meticulous attention to operational execution and regulatory compliance. The prospect of a public company leaking its proprietary source code raises serious concerns and could foreseeably lead to shareholder litigation.
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