- Anthropic is trying to patch its Claude Code leak
- Copyright takedown notices have now been issued
- No private user data was included in the code leak
Anthropic is hard at work trying to contain the damage from the massive Claude Code leak earlier this week, which spilled more than half a million lines of code onto the open web and exposed some of the AI chatbot’s inner workings.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal and others, Anthropic is now issuing copyright takedown notices to prevent further distribution of the source code. The data leak has continued to spread across thousands of GitHub pages.
Yes, this is the same Anthropic that last year had to pay $1.5 billion (£1.14 billion / AU$2.18 billion) to authors whose books had been pirated without permission to feed training data into Claude’s AI models.
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No user data was included in the leak, Anthropic says. “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach,” a spokesperson told the WSJ. “We are rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again.”
‘Good luck with that’
Anthropic issues copyright takedown requests to remove 8,000+ copies of Claude Code source code from r/technology
The contrast in approaches to copyright law is not lost on the Reddit community, with reactions ranging from “the irony is rich” to “good luck with that” – and more than one reference to AI bots as “plagiarism machines”.
Claude Code is not the regular Claude chatbot used by most consumers, but the programming assistant that a growing number of developers now rely on. It is widely considered to be the best in the business, which makes this leak all the more egregious.
Despite its strong reputation, there are concerns that Claude Code (and its competitors) produces lots of AI-written code that doesn’t follow best practices in terms of safety or security. Whether “vibe coding” was responsible for this specific leak is not clear.
Both Anthropic and its competitors continue to try to balance user features and access against the enormous costs of running AI systems. For the past few days, Claude users have seen usage limits capped at certain times, even those who pay for the service.
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