Anthropic exposes Claude: code ends up online due to human error
The source code of Claude Code, the model for programmers, was exposed for hours: half a million lines of code revealing the software architecture
"This release was caused by human error, not a security breach. We are implementing countermeasures to prevent it from happening again'. This statement, emailed by an Anthropic spokesperson to VentureBeat.com, on the one hand reassures that no sensitive customer data or login credentials were leaked. On the other, however, it confirms the news: the entire code of Claude Code, the AI model dedicated to programming, ended up online.
The trouble can be traced back to version 2.1.88 of the software, released on the American afternoon of Tuesday 31 March. The source map, which could be used to reconstruct Claude Code's source code, almost 2,000 TypeScript files and more than half a million lines of code, had been left inside.
An incident that follows that of a few days ago, when a leak of documents made it known that Anthropic is working on a new model, even more powerful than the current ones, called Mythos, which would, however, still present major problems in terms of cybersecurity. While it is true that part of the source code that ended up online by mistake is protected by copyright, nevertheless having made it accessible will allow competing companies to look under the bonnet of the artificial intelligence model that in recent weeks has been experiencing a phase of great interest on the part of the public, linked in part to the controversy with the Pentagon over the limits to be placed or not placed on the use of AI for defence purposes. And thus better understand how its architecture works and draw insights to build rival models of Claude Code.
The files in question were obviously removed. Sole24Ore managed to recover them and fed them to Claude Opus 4.6, the most advanced Anthropic model currently available. "It is the entire source of the Claude Code client," he replied when asked what the downloaded code was. "It is normal" that it is online, he added: "Claude Code is open source, Anthropic has released the source code publicly on GitHub. So it is completely legitimate that you have downloaded it and that it is searchable'. However, when asked to read one of the articles on the subject, he admitted: 'Claude Code's source code was not intended to be public. What you have in your folder is the code reconstructed from the leak. It is not an official open source project, it is proprietary code that ended up online by mistake. I apologise for the incorrect information in the previous answer'.
