Anthropic has been scrambling to contain a self-inflicted mess after it accidentally leaked a treasure trove of internal code that powers one of its most valuable artificial intelligence tools, according to reports.
The code serves as instructions for Claude Code, an AI agent app that developers and businesses pay top dollar to use to program and build applications of their own.
Anthropic’s competitors and hoards of startups and developers now have the goods to essentially clone features of Claude Code — a shortcut to reverse-engineering them, the Wall Street Journal noted.
By Wednesday morning, Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to get more than 8,000 copies and adaptations of the source code removed that developers had shared on programming platform GitHub.
The leak of “some internal source code” didn’t expose any customer information or data, a spokesman for Anthropic told news outlets. The secret inner mathematics of the company’s pricey AI models reportedly weren’t revealed, either.
“This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again,” the spokesman said.
The Post has sought comment from Anthropic.
Still, the leak revealed information that helps the company stay ahead of competitors, including tools and instructions for getting its AI models to work as coding agents, according to the Journal.
The leak also gives hackers fresh ammunition as they hunt for ways to exploit Claude Code software or use its model to launch cyberattacks.
The snafu reportedly began Tuesday, when Anthropic updated its AI tool. Like most proprietary software, Claude’s source code is usually scrambled and unintelligible. But this time, the company posted a file to GitHub that linked back to code that outsiders could download and interpret.
The folly was spotted by a user on social media site X, and word spread from there.
The leak sets Anthropic back both in terms of its safety reputation and in the cutthroat battle for enterprise customers where maintaining an innovation edge is paramount.
The setback comes as Anthropic has been fighting the Department of War in court after being blacklisted earlier this year. Last week, Anthropic won an injunction that halted its designation as a “supply-chain risk.”
The growing popularity of Claude Code helped Anthropic ink a recent funding deal that valued the company at $380 billion ahead of a possible public offering this year.
