Takedown Notice from Anthropic for Claude Code

The conflict between two “agentic” coding tools, Claude Code from Anthropic and Codex CLI from OpenAI, seems to be favoring the latter over the former among developers. A developer attempting to reverse-engineer Claude Code, which is subject to a more restricted usage license than Codex CLI, has received takedown letters from Anthropic, which is at least partially to blame for this.

The functionalities of both Claude and Codex CLI are the same. They enable users to use cloud-based AI models to do various coding jobs. The source code of Codex CLI is free for distribution and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. However, Claude Code is bound by the business license of Anthropic, which restricts the ways it may be altered without the company’s explicit permission.

Anthropic has obfuscated the source code of Claude Code, and it is not easily interpretable. A developer has de-obfuscated the source code of the Claude Code and made it readily available on GitHub. However, Anthropic has sent a copyright notification (DMCA) demanding the removal of the code.

Developers shared dissatisfaction with the decision of Anthropic over social media by comparing it with the release of Codex CLI of OpenAI. As Codex CLI source code has already been integrated with more than hundreds of updates from developers, which also includes accessing AI models from Anthropic too.

Claude Code is currently experiencing some glitches and is still in beta. Anthropic may provide a permissive license for the source code and make it available in the future. Businesses obfuscate codes for a variety of reasons, but security concerns are among the most common.

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