Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has accidentally revealed the source code of its popular coding tool Claude Code.
The leak occurred Tuesday morning when the company released version 2.1.88 of Claude Code to the npm public registry and inadvertently included a source map file, exposing more than 500,000 lines of code and nearly 2,000 files. A link to an archive containing the files was posted on X by security researcher Chaofan Shou, attracting more than 27 million views.
Claude AI is a versatile AI tool capable of answering questions, generating creative content like stories and poems, translating languages, transcribing and analyzing images, writing code, summarizing text, and engaging people in natural, interactive conversations.
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the leak, saying it was caused by human error and that the company was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.
“Earlier today, a release of Claude Code included internal source code,” the spokesperson said. “No sensitive customer data or identifiers were involved or exposed.”
Although Claude Code was allegedly reverse-engineered, the leak offers developers a rare glimpse into the roadmap of perhaps Anthropics’ most popular product, allowing competitors a glimpse into the coding tool’s underpinnings.
The tool has seen a surge in popularity in recent months, with the Claude Code app having a viral moment over the holidays when people discovered its mood coding capabilities. Anthropic launched a Super Bowl ad campaign attacking rival OpenAI for its decision to put ads in its free and low-cost ChatGPT plans.
