Khaberni - Anthropic caused the deletion of thousands of code repositories on the GitHub platform, following an attempt to contain an unintended source code leak for one of its leading products.
The incident began when a software engineer discovered that a recent release of the company's “Claude Code” tool had mistakenly included access to the source code of the app.
The code quickly spread among the developer community, where it was analyzed and widely shared on GitHub, according to a report published by "Tech Crunch".
In an attempt to contain the leak, the company sent a legal notice to GitHub based on U.S. copyright laws, demanding the removal of repositories containing the leaked code.
However, the implementation was broader than expected, as it included about 8,100 repositories, including legitimate Forks of the official open repository of the project, which caused a wave of anger among developers.
In turn, Boris Cherny, the person in charge of the “Claude Code” project, explained that what happened was the result of an unintended error, confirming that the company quickly withdrew most of the deletion requests.
The action was scaled down to include only one repository and 96 associated Forks containing the leaked code.
The company attributed the expansion of the deletion to the fact that the targeted repository was part of a network of Forks linked to the official repository, which led to the action extending to a larger number of repositories unintentionally.
The company confirmed that GitHub later restored access to the affected repositories after most requests were retracted.
This incident comes at a sensitive time for the company, which is expected to move towards an initial public offering in the markets, which imposes higher levels of precision and discipline on it, especially regarding the protection of intellectual property and avoiding technical mistakes.
