Anthropic Issues 8,000+ DMCA Takedowns After Accidental Claude Code Source Leak

Anthropic accidentally exposed over 500,000 lines of proprietary Claude Code source code when version 2.1.88 was published to npm with an internal debugging source map file. The leak triggered a rapid replication effort across the developer community. Anthropic issued DMCA takedown requests for more than 8,000 GitHub repositories, though the company later acknowledged the takedowns were broader than intended and retracted most of them. The incident puts Anthropic on the defensive side of the intellectual property debate as it faces a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors, with a fairness hearing scheduled for April 23.