Shadowing Practice: Tragic mistake... Anthropic leaks Claude’s source code - Learn English Speaking with Video

Yesterday, the most ironic thing ever happened.

Anthropic, a $380 billion startup built on the idea of safety first, that advocates for closed-source software for the supposed benefit of humanity,

a company Elon calls Miss Anthropic, whose logo is definitely not a sphincter, whose CEO has been warning us for years that human programmers will be replaced by AI in six months,

just accidentally leaked Claude Code's entire source code to the internet at 4am, officially making Anthropic more open than OpenAI.

Within minutes of the leak, Chaofan Xiao, a security researcher,

discovered that version 2.1.88 of the Cloud Code NPM package was shipped with a 57MB source map file.

You know, that file that's only used in development with the full readable source code of your project.

This holy grail of leaks containing over 500,000 lines of TypeScript code quickly spread across the internet like wildfire.

Anthropic's legal team courageously issued DMCA takedowns, but by the time they woke up in San Francisco, it was already too late.

The code was mirrored countless times and cloned by slop tubers like Fireship, which the Supreme Court says I can do legally, by the way, as a world-renowned journalist.

I know a lot about the law and various other lawyerings, um...

In today's video, we'll look at all of the incredible discoveries in the code that Anthropic doesn't want you to know about.

Like its anti-distillation poison pills, its mysterious unreleased features, its undercover mode, its regular expression-based frustration detector,

and many other super-secret techniques at the foreskin of AI research.

No, this is not an April Fool's Day joke, it is April 1st, 2026, and you're watching the code report.

Unfortunately, my lawyer just informed me that showing you Anthropik's TypeScript code would be a violation of my parole, and I refuse to go back to jail.

But luckily, the open source community has already created a loophole.

Ironically, Claude's most prolific user used OpenAI Codex to rewrite Claude Code's TypeScript code to Python code, resulting in a new, barely legal project called ClawCode,

and it's already become the fastest repo in history to surpass 50,000 GitHub stars.

Not only that, but somebody else slop-forked the leaked code and made it work with any model.

They're calling this new project OpenClaude, and it makes projects like OpenCode completely obsolete.

But maybe, now that the code's out in the open, Anthropic will just make it open source.

Somebody tried to make a pull request with the leaked code, but not surprisingly, it looks like Anthropic already deleted it.

What a mother-effin' crazy 24 hours, but how did this code end up leaked in the first place?

Well, as I mentioned, the source map was accidentally packaged in an NPM release, but that's weird because build tools normally strip out source maps automatically.

Well, Cloud Code is built on BunJS, which as you might recall was recently acquired by Anthropic.

And it just so happens that about three weeks ago, somebody opened up an issue on GitHub about BunJS serving source maps in production.

Wouldn't it be ironic

if the fastest JavaScript runtime in the world also turned out

to be the fastest way to ship your entire codebase to the internet?

It's unclear if that was the root cause, and it's also possible that some unfortunate developer did this by accident, or perhaps some rogue developer did it on purpose.

We may never know the truth, but now it's time for the fun part.

What did we actually learn from the leak?

Well first, we learned that Claude uses Axios.

If you subscribe to my channel, then you know that Axios was compromised by North Korean hackers yesterday.

The exploit can install a remote access Trojan on anyone using this package, and in theory, if that happened on Anthropic servers, it could be a massive disaster.

But the next thing we learned is that Claude code is basically just a dynamic prompt sandwich glued together with TypeScript, and not some magical piece of futuristic technology.

In a basic AI chatbot, you typically have a hidden system prompt that gets combined with your prompt,

then the base model uses statistics to regurgitate a bunch of data it stole from the internet.

But in Claude code, things are far more complex, with a total of 11 steps from input to output.

Somebody already vibe-coded a website that breaks down every step, but the most interesting part about this codebase is

that it contains tons of hard-coded instructions and guardrails that basically beg Claude to please don't do anything weird.

Like there's just file after file of these massive hard-coded strings telling Claude to be a good boy.

And that's kind of surprising, because if this code were ever leaked, it would instantly turn from a black box into a blueprint for Claude's competition.

And ironically, that's exactly what happened.

What makes that even more funny, though, is that Claude was actively trying to stop their competition from copying Claude code by implementing anti-distillation poison pills.

It does that by pretending that certain tools exist, when in reality, they don't exist at all.

You're a big fat That means if you're some Chinese guy trying to train a new model on Claude's outputs, it's going to talk about tools that don't exist,

which will point your model in the wrong direction and just make it suck.

In reality, Claude Code only uses about 25 different tools or so, and now the Claude distillers know exactly what to look for, and they're likely going to have a field day with the Bash tool.

This file contains over a thousand lines of code that helps the large language model reliably parse and execute Bash commands,

which might be the single most important feature in an AI coding assistant.

The next thing we need to talk about, though, is undercover mode, which is a set of instructions that tell Claude to never mention itself in commit messages or outputs,

where the main idea is to make the outputs look as human as possible.

The stated purpose of this feature is to prevent things like model codename leaks, but many have speculated that the true purpose is more deceptive,

like they're trying to covertly use Claude in open-source projects so AI code doesn't get scrutinized when it breaks things catastrophically.

A very misanthropic idea, indeed.

But the irony continues.

Another funny thing found in the code is its regex frustration detector.

Your state-of-the-art AI model uses simple regular expression matching against your prompt to look for keywords like shit, fuck, cock, balls, and so on,

to determine if you're not having a good experience coding with Claude.

If it detects a match, it'll simply log an event.

The bottom line here is that we're not looking at some sort of alien superintelligence, but rather basic programming concepts that have been around for 50 years combined with a bunch of prompt spaghetti.

It's all just an illusion.

On top of that, this codebase has a ton of comments.

A lot more comments than you would typically find in a human-written codebase.

And what that tells us is that these comments aren't actually written for humans, but rather for the AI to write its own AI coding tool in an infinite loop.

But perhaps the biggest problem about this League 4 Anthropic is not the code itself, but rather the feature names and roadmap hidden within the code.

Like there's a hidden capability under a feature flag called Buddy,

which appears to be a new Tamagotchi-style companion that every developer can customize and raise like a little digital pet.

This might just be Anthropik's April Fool's Day joke, but there are also references to Opus 4.7 and a new model called Capybara,

which might be their new recently-teased Mythos model.

There's also things like Ultra Plan, Coordinator Mode, and Demon Mode, but perhaps the most interesting is Kairos,

which is a Greek word for an exact moment in time, or God's time.

I hate to beat off a dead horse here, but it's a bit ironic that Anthropic didn't get to reveal Kairos at the exact time it wanted to, and instead, God chose the right time.

The feature itself seems to be some kind of background agent that keeps a daily journal, uses dream mode to consolidate memories, and does work for you in the background on a specific schedule.

Pretty cool, but at the end of the day, this leak is a pretty huge setback for Anthropic, which hopes to IPO later this year and offload their bags to the retail public.

And it's yet another reminder that your top secret application is just one NPM publish away from becoming open source, whether you like it or not.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Tragic mistake... Anthropic leaks Claude’s source code”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: code, Claude, Anthropic, source, model. This video has 78 sentences and 1477 words to shadow. The speech runs for 7:22. The speaker talks fast, about 200 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
leak noun	/liːk/	A crack, crevice, fissure, or hole which admits water or other fluid, or lets it escape.
prompt verb	/pɹɑmpt/	To lead (someone) toward what they should say or do.
codebase noun		The body of source code used to create a particular computer program or software component.
ironic adjective	/aɪˈɹɑ.nɪk/	Characterized by or constituting (any kind of) irony.
distillation noun	/dɪstɪˈleɪʃən/	The act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
slop noun	/slɑp/	Any semisolid substance; goo, paste, pulp.
detector noun	/dɪˈtɛktə(ɹ)/	A device capable of registering a specific substance or physical phenomenon, and that optionally sounds an alarm or triggers a warning.
ironically adverb	/aɪˈɹɑnɪkli/	In an ironic manner; in a way displaying irony.
undercover adjective	/ˌʌndə(ɹ)ˈkʌvə(ɹ)/	Performed or happening in secret.
frustration noun	/fɹʌsˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/	The feeling of annoyance at impossibility from resistance or inability to achieve something.
pill noun	/pɪl/	A small, usually round or cylindrical object designed for easy swallowing, usually containing some sort of medication.
poison noun	/ˈpɔɪ.zən/	A substance that is harmful or lethal to a living organism when ingested.
blueprint noun	/ˈbluːˌpɹɪnt/	A type of paper-based reproduction process producing white-on-blue images by means of a photosensitive ferric compound, used primarily for technical and…
catastrophically adverb		In a catastrophic manner, or to a catastrophic extent; disastrously.
chatbot noun	/ˈtʃætbɑt/	A computer program that holds conversations through a chat room.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
break down verb	To stop functioning.
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
go back to verb	To stem from; to originate in.
open up verb	To open.
turn out verb	To end up; to result.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If it detects a match, it'll simply
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	will be replaced · was shipped · was mirrored
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has already created · have speculated · have been

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: distillation /dɪstɪˈleɪʃən/, frustration /fɹʌsˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, illusion /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/
Long words — get the stress right: distillation /dɪstɪˈleɪʃən/, ironically /aɪˈɹɑnɪkli/, undercover /ˌʌndə(ɹ)ˈkʌvə(ɹ)/, consolidate /kənˈsɒl.ɪ.deɪt/, futuristic /ˌfjut͡ʃəˈɹɪstɪk/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like leak, prompt, codebase.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?