How an engineer ensured Claude Code source code leak stays on GitHub despite Anthropic’s takedown notice
A day after the source code of Anthropic Claude Code – its popular AI coding assistant – leaked online, the company quickly raced to file copyright takedown requests with GitHub, successfully pulling down more than 8,000 copies of the instructions that had spread like wildfire across the platform overnight. But one engineer had other ideas, and the workaround appears to be legal and harder to contain.According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic moved fast, deploying copyright takedown notices that swept more than 8,000 copies off GitHub. Then came the workaround: Just as Anthropic’s takedown campaign was gaining momentum, a programmer found a way around it entirely. Rather than simply reposting the leaked code, which most of the programmers did and would have been immediately flagged and removed, this engineer used other AI tools to rewrite Claude Code’s instructions in a different programming language.
Reddit posts claims Anthropic Code source code was rewritten in Python
As per a post on Reddit, the programmer used AI tools to rewrite the instructions in Python. Here’s the post.On March 31, someone leaked the entire source code of Anthropic’s Claude Code through a sourcemap file in their npm package.A developer named realsigridjin quickly backed it up on GitHub. Anthropic hit back fast with DMCA takedowns and started deleting the repos.Instead of giving up, this guy did something wild. He took the whole thing and completely rewrote it in Python using AI tools. The new version has almost the same features, but because it’s a full rewrite in a different language, he claims it’s no longer copyright infringement.The rewrite only took a few hours. Now the Python version is still up and gaining stars quickly.A lot of people are saying this shows how hard it’s going to be to protect closed source code in the AI era. Just change the language and suddenly DMCA becomes much harder to enforce.By doing this, the programmer said, they aim at keeping the information available without risking a takedown. That new version has itself become popular on the programming platform.
