'The irony is rich': Anthropic issues copyright takedown requests in attempt to stem Claude Code leak

• Anthropic is trying to patch up 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 limit 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, revealing 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 stop its source code from spreading any further. The data leak has continued to spread across thousands of GitHub pages.

Yes, that's the same Anthropic that had to pay out a cool $1.5 billion (£1.14 billion / AU$2.18 billion) last year to authors whose books had been pirated without permission, in order to feed training data into Claude's AI models.

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're 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 isn't 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 isn't the regular Claude chatbot used by most consumers, but the programming assistant that an increasing number of developers now rely on. It's widely regarded as the best in the business, making this leak even more egregious.

Despite its strong reputation, there are worries that Claude Code (and its competitors) are producing masses of AI-written code that doesn't follow best practices in terms of security or safety. Whether or not 'vibe coding' was responsible for this specific leak isn't clear.

Both Anthropic and its competitors continue to try to balance user features and access against the vast cost of running AI systems. In the last few days, Claude users have seen usage limits restricted during certain times, even those paying for the service.

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