Anthropic has acknowledged that thousands of GitHub repositories were unintentionally taken down following an effort to remove leaked source code related to its Claude Code AI product. The incident began after a software engineer identified that a recent release had exposed parts of the application’s underlying code, prompting widespread sharing and analysis within developer communities.
In response, Anthropic issued a copyright-based takedown request, which GitHub records show affected approximately 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of the company’s own public codebase. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, indicated that the scope of the takedown was broader than intended due to the structure of repository networks.
The company has since reversed most of the removals, restoring access while continuing efforts to contain the leaked AI-related code.
