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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Sanya Mansoor and agency

Claude’s code: Anthropic leaks source code for AI software engineering tool

a webpage with Anthropic in bold
Pages from the Anthropic website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York on 26 February 2026. Photograph: Patrick Sison/AP

Anthropic accidentally released part of the internal source code for its AI-powered coding assistant, Claude Code, due to “human error”, the company said on Tuesday.

An internal-use file mistakenly included in a software update pointed to an archive containing nearly 2,000 files and 500,000 lines of code, which were quickly copied to developer platform GitHub. A post on X sharing a link to the leaked code had more than 29m views early on Wednesday, and a rewritten version of the source code quickly became GitHub’s fastest-ever downloaded repository. Anthropic issued copyright takedown requests to try to contain the code’s spread. Within the code, users spotted blueprints for a Tamagotchi-esque coding assistant and an always-on AI agent, per the Verge.

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