Editorial illustration for Anthropic's DMCA notice targets leaked code repo, also affects legit forks
Anthropic's DMCA Targets Leaked Code Repo on GitHub
A copyright takedown notice is supposed to be a scalpel. Anthropic just turned it into a firehose and doused half of GitHub. The AI company issued a standard DMCA request this week to kill a single repository hosting leaked proprietary code.
GitHub's response was anything but standard. It nuked the original repo, then proceeded to obliterate over 8,000 forks connected to it. Buried in that staggering number were hundreds of perfectly legal forks of Anthropic's own public Claude Code project, a repository the company explicitly maintains for public collaboration.
The intended surgical strike instead became a carpet bombing. Legitimate developer work vanished overnight.
The DMCA notice that GitHub received late Tuesday focuses on a repository containing the leaked source code originally posted by GitHub user nirholas (archived here) and nearly 100 specifically named forks of that repository. In a note appended to that request, though, GitHub said it had acted to take down a network of 8,100 similar forked repositories because "the submitter alleged that all or most of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository." That expanded takedown affected many repositories that didn't contain leaked code but instead forked Anthropic's official public Claude Code repository, which the company shares to encourage public bug reports and fixes.
This is the DMCA's signature failure. A process designed for speed will always sacrifice accuracy. Anthropic had a legitimate gripe with one leak.
Its legal team filed the paperwork. Then the platform's automated systems took that complaint and applied it with a brutal, algorithmic logic. Every fork became suspect.
The result is a stark contradiction. A company cannot on one hand open a public repository, encourage developers to fork it and submit pull requests, and then on the other hand authorize a takedown that treats those same sanctioned forks as piracy. It makes the open-source gesture look like a trap.
The real cost isn't the temporary loss of a few repos. It's the chilling signal it sends to anyone thinking of building on a corporate project. Trust is the currency of collaboration.
This is how you bankrupt it.
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Common Questions Answered
Why did Anthropic issue a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub?
Anthropic sent a DMCA takedown request targeting a repository containing leaked Claude code originally posted by GitHub user nirholas. The legal action aimed to remove unauthorized source code that had been distributed across multiple repository forks.
How many repository forks were initially impacted by Anthropic's DMCA notice?
The DMCA notice specifically named nearly 100 repository forks, but GitHub ultimately took down a network of 8,100 similar forked repositories. Many of these forks were maintained by developers unrelated to the original code leak.
What was GitHub's response to Anthropic's broad DMCA takedown request?
GitHub initially complied with the takedown notice by removing the identified repositories. However, the platform later restored many legitimate forks after recognizing the overreach of the original request, acknowledging that not all forks were infringing.
Further Reading
- Anthropic took down thousands of GitHub repos trying to yank its leaked source code a move the company says was an accident — TechCrunch
- Claude Code leak puts Anthropic on the other side of the copyright battle — Business Insider
- dmca/2025/04/2025-04-28-anthropic.md at master - GitHub — GitHub DMCA Archive
