Anthropic confirms it leaked the source for Claude Code, blames human error

Anthropic is one of the biggest AI companies on the planet, and a leak was detected on Tuesday morning that exposed the source code of Claude Code, a developer-focused capability that integrates Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, into programming workflows.

According to the company, the leak was detected shortly after version 2.1.88 of Claude Code was made public, as the newly released version mistakenly included a source map file that exposed more than 500,000 lines of code and nearly 2,000 files. As you can probably imagine, internet sleuths were able to extract the files before Anthropic could deploy a fix, as a link to an archive containing them was posted to X by security researcher Chaofan Shou. The post caught the attention of more than 27 million users.

An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the leak, saying the company is now reviewing steps to prevent a similar egregious human error from occurring again. The spokesperson provided a statement, saying, "Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed."

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The damage from this leak could be catastrophic for Anthropic, as competing AI companies will now get a look at what's under the hood of its most popular product. From that, they can see what Claude Code lacks and what it does well, implementing those aspects and others into their own AI tools.

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