I got DMCA'd by Anthropic (not a joke)

TL;DR

Anthropic's mass DMCA filing accidentally struck 8,100 GitHub repos including the creator's one-word code change, but was quickly retracted as a GitHub communication error.

Key Points

• 1.The DMCA hit an absurdly innocent repo. The struck repository wasn't the leaked Claude Code source — it was the creator's fork of the official Anthropic repo where he changed exactly one word in one markdown skill file.
• 2.Anthropic's DMCA notice swept up 8,100 repositories. GitHub published the notice targeting a network of 8,100 repos, far exceeding the handful actually hosting the leaked source code, suggesting the enforcement went rogue.
• 3.Filing a false DMCA strike is illegal under U.S. law. The creator notes that enforcing a DMCA against non-infringing content is a prosecutable offense, and he was prepared to file a counter-notice and pursue a class-action lawsuit.
• 4.Anthropic retracted the notice rapidly, blaming a GitHub miscommunication. Employees including Boris publicly stated no one at Anthropic intentionally DMCA'd these forks, and repos like the Claude Code Rust rewrite (which hit 100k stars in under a day — fastest-growing GitHub repo ever) were left untouched.
• 5.Anthropic's crisis comms won praise after the creator's advice to 'be human.' Employees like Boris and Thoric engaged openly on Twitter — joking about the leak, crediting individual contributors, and responding to the snail buddy feature meme — reversing the creator's low expectations.
• 6.The creator argues open-sourcing Claude Code would have prevented all of this. He says Anthropic has now had more GitHub repos taken down than any company in history, a self-inflicted crisis caused entirely by keeping the source closed, and suspects ego prevents them from reversing course.