Anthropic's DMCA takedown accidentally wipes 8,100 GitHub forks
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- Anthropic filed a DMCA notice late Tuesday targeting a leaked Claude Code repository and 96 specifically named forks; GitHub then expanded the takedown to roughly 8,100 repositories across the same fork network because Anthropic alleged all of them were infringing to the same extent as the parent.
- The overreach swept up legitimate forks of Anthropic's official public Claude Code repository—which the company shares to encourage community bug reports—with affected developers like Robert McLaws publicly complaining and announcing plans to file DMCA counter-notices.
- By Wednesday, Anthropic retracted the notice, asking GitHub to reinstate all affected repositories except the one named leaked repo, with Boris Cherny calling the overreach "not intentional" and Thariq Shihipar blaming a "communication mistake."
- Copies of the leaked source code remain available on GitHub and have spread to Germany-based Codeberg, which sits outside US DMCA reach though potentially subject to local European laws.
- Multiple coders have used AI tools to produce "clean room" reimplementations of the leak in Python and Rust, which may be legally distinct from the original though the status of AI-rewritten code remains disputed.
- Boris Cherny admitted in December that "in the last thirty days, 100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code"—a fact that could complicate Anthropic's copyright claims, since US Copyright Office protections generally don't extend to fully AI-generated work.
Why it matters: Even after Anthropic's retraction, the leaked Claude Code source remains widely mirrored on GitHub, Codeberg, and AI-rewritten Python and Rust clones, making the cleanup effort largely futile. The episode also exposes a legal irony: Cherny's admission that Claude Code wrote 100% of his contributions could undermine the copyright grounds Anthropic is invoking to fight the leak's spread.
