Anthropic unintentionally removed thousands of GitHub repositories while attempting to retract its leaked source code, calling the incident an accident.

Anthropic unintentionally triggered the removal of thousands of GitHub repositories while attempting to retract copies of its most popular product’s source code from the internet.

On Tuesday, a software engineer found that Anthropic had apparently, by mistake, included access to the source code for its leading Claude Code command-line application in a recent release.

AI enthusiasts examined the leaked code for insights into how Anthropic powers the LLM behind the app, then shared it widely on GitHub.

Anthropic filed a takedown notice under U.S. digital copyright law, requesting GitHub remove repositories containing the exposed code.

GitHub records show the notice affected roughly 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s own publicly released Claude Code repository, sparking complaints from users whose projects were blocked.

The head of Claude Code at Anthropic, Boris Cherny said the takedown was accidental and that the company has retracted most of the notices, now limiting the action to a single repository and 96 forks containing the inadvertently released source code.