IBL News | New York
Anthropic raced yesterday to contain the accidental leak of Claude Code’s underlying software instructions, which developers analyzed on GitHub.
By Wednesday morning, Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies, clones, and adaptations of the raw Claude Code shared on GitHub.
When a developer de-obfuscated it and released the source code on GitHub, Anthropic filed a DMCA complaint — a copyright notification requesting the code’s removal.
Developers on social media weren’t pleased by the move, which they said compared unfavorably with OpenAI’s rollout of Codex CLI.
After the leak, developers reverse-engineered Claude Code, and competitors gained access to Anthropic’s feature roadmap and much of its software secrets.
The leaked zip archive on Anthropic’s own cloud storage, containing the full source code, with nearly 2,000 files and 500,000 lines of code, included dozens of feature flags for capabilities that appear fully built but haven’t shipped.
One of the crown features of the code was a “persistent assistant” running in background mode that lets Claude keep working even when a user is idle.