.png){kind=logo}
Anthropic has issued 8,000 copyright takedown requests. This decision followed the accidental exposure of the entire source code for Claude AI, which is their AI model. The leak has reportedly revealed commercially sensitive information. The leaks included internal tools, proprietary techniques, and specific instructions for transforming its AI models into functional coding agents.
On Tuesday, 31 March 2026, 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 underlying the application, and shared 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 served on some 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s publicly released Claude Code repository.
In response to the mishap, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, explained that the move was accidental and the company has retracted the bulk of the takedown notices. Now it will be limited 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. We retracted the notice for everything except the one repo we named, and GitHub has restored access to the affected forks,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch while speaking about the code leak incident.
Also Read: OpenAI, Anthropic Highlight How AI Tools Could Empower Hackers
