In the tech world, it is all about experiments, mistakes, and building solutions to improve upon the existing system. Nothing is ever perfect, even after multiple iterations.
That being said, when a notable company makes a mistake, it can leave a lasting impression. That is exactly what happened with Anthropic. Although it may have gone unnoticed until now, the situation is worth noting.
Anthropic suggested a dangerous command to users, irrespective of their system configuration, in the process of helping users enable the auto-update feature for the command line interface (CLI). The issue has been fixed as of now.
Bricking Sudo, Bricking Your System
Sudo is a command in Linux that gives users elevated privileges to make system-level changes. It is advised against using the prefix sudo for any command, unless absolutely necessary.
However, Anthropic recommended a dangerous command through its Claude Code CLI to help users automate updates with the same prefix as part of its configuration instructions, as noticed by Linux users.
The spotty command ended up breaking many Linux systems, including Ubuntu and Arch installations.
Breaking down the command, the /usr directory is where all the executables and essential system files reside. The command here tries to change the permissions and ownership of the directory leading to system instability and potential security issues.
Users mention that they had to go through several steps to recover their system state. The steps often included heading to the Grub bootloader and dropping down to the root shell to change permissions.
Community to the Rescue Helping Anthropic Fix It
When a software engineer, Sid Bidasaria, at Anthropic noticed it, a fix was implemented to redirect users to a documentation page for more information by removing the suggested command.
However, it was not well-received by the community, prompting them to suggest more action items in a separate GitHub issue.
The suggestion pointed out that the documentation page for Claude Code installation should reflect all the information suggested in the form of commits.
The contributor suggested Anthropic to modify Claude Code CLI to detect when it is running as root, and warn people to reconsider. Moreover, Anthropic should email the preview release program participants to inform them.
Addressing the core problem, Bidasaria explained, “When we saw that the installation location wasn’t user-writable, one of the two suggestions in the product was changing folder permissions with chmod/chown commands. That was a mistake and it hit some users with the global npm prefix set to /usr pretty hard. We’ve removed those problematic commands and now point users to better guidance.”
Anthropic updated the documentation on March 6, adding a troubleshooting guide to the mix, and thanked the contributors for their inputs on addressing the issue. “Thanks for helping us improve Claude Code! Safety is super important to us at Anthropic, and we really appreciate you taking the time to help make things better,” Bidasaria added.
He closed multiple issues pointing out the issue, and clarified, “Apologies for this. This was a bug where for some users whose npm global prefix was set to /usr/local, we displayed a bad command to run.”
Do Not Execute a Command You Do Not Know About
Netizens discussing the issue realised something important, i.e., not to type in anything they do not know about in the Linux terminal.
As a joke, some speculated that the bad instructions were written by Claude itself, while some believed it was a simple human error.
Meanwhile, referencing vibe coding, a user mentioned, “Vibe scripting gone wrong.”
Not just for Anthropic users, a small incident like this should encourage developers and users to thoroughly understand what they are doing, even when following official installation instructions.
