Controversial, hidden, or upcoming features discovered in leaked Claude Code

Digital sleuths, browsing over 512,000 lines of code leaked from Anthropic’s Claude Code, have uncovered numerous hidden, inactive, or already disabled features. Some of them are quite controversial.

The mere fact that the full source code of Anthropic’s flagship tool, Claude Code, was leaked is big enough news. But more is emerging every day.

After digging through more than 512,000 leaked lines of code, Reddit users say they’ve uncovered numerous curious and controversial features throughout. They provide a peek into how Anthropic operates and plans for the future.

Kairos: a signal of the post-prompting era

The most curious find is probably a virtual assistant named Buddy. One Reddit user, writing in the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, said they uncovered a “Tamagotchi”-like feature, referring, of course, to the digital pets you need to take care of to keep them alive.

“There’s an entire pet system called /buddy. When you type it, you hatch a unique ascii companion based on your user id,” the user said.

“The pet sits beside your input box and reacts to your coding.”

As many as 18 different pet species have been found, including a dragon, duck, and capybara. It’s very vibe-coding friendly, indeed: no wonder fellow Redditors are now demanding Anthropic ship the system immediately.

Sadly, the user also found an included string reading “friend-2026-401.” This presumably means that the feature is intended to be an April Fools' one-off.

However, a shinier star of the show, so to speak, could be a feature called “Kairos.” Apparently, it could serve as an always-on AI agent, constantly running in the background and taking actions on your behalf without being asked to do so.

Kairos may even notify the user via their phone or computer to get their attention, and operates even when the Claude Code terminal window is closed.

A prompt hidden behind a disabled Kairos flag in the code says that the system is designed to “have a complete picture of who the user is, how they’d like to collaborate with you, what behaviors to avoid or repeat, and the context behind the work the user gives you.”

Quite an embarrassment for Anthropic

Kairos isn’t switched on yet, but according to some industry enthusiasts, the feature essentially shows us Anthropic’s endgame: it can do anything Claude Code already does, but without users telling it to.

“Regular Claude Code can only talk to you when you talk to it. Kairos can tap you on the shoulder,” wrote Ole Lehmann, a so-called AI connoisseur.

“We are heading into the post-prompting era where the AI just works for you in the background.”

A separate “Undercover mode”, though inactive, seems more controversial, apparently allowing Anthropic employees to contribute to public open source repositories without revealing themselves as AI agents.

The unearthed prompt explicitly tells the system that its commits should “never include the phrase ‘Claude Code’ or any mention that you are an AI,” and to omit any “co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution.”

That kind of obfuscation is certainly interesting, given persistent controversies surrounding AI coding tools being used on popular repositories and, actually, in general.

The whole saga is undoubtedly quite an embarrassment for Anthropic. The company has scrambled to get the exposed source code pulled with the help of DMCA takedown requests.

However, they’re unlikely to reach decentralized code-sharing platforms. On the contrary, a repository called claw-code, a clean slate rewrite of Claude Code, is now the fastest growing GitHub repo in history.

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