Apiiro finds about 1,100 secrets from 63 organizations in over 100,000 Claude Code local settings files uploaded to public GitHub repos

Security firm Apiiro says it found more than 100,000 public GitHub repositories containing Claude Code's local settings file (.claude/settings.local.json). About 1,100 of those files, from 63 organisations, held secrets such as database passwords, API tokens and private keys. The file stores approved shell commands word for word, so any credential typed into an approved command ends up in it, and the ignore protection that is meant to keep the file out of commits is set globally rather than per repository. Apiiro says 215 of the secrets were missed by the scanners gitleaks and TruffleHog. Anthropic has not shipped a fix. Boris Cherny of the Claude Code team said on Hacker News that the team is looking at prevention and considering built-in secret scanning.

Any team using Claude Code on repositories that could become public should treat this as a real credential-hygiene risk, because leaked secrets can persist in forks even after the file is deleted. The practical decisions are to check for the file in your repos, add it to each repo's own .gitignore, and rotate any credential that might have been pasted into an approved command. The finding that scanners missed 215 secrets also suggests that relying on a single scanner is not enough. The scale is modest, though: roughly 1% of the exposed files held secrets, and the figures come from the vendor's own research.

The headline "all over GitHub" overstates the spread, since only about 1,100 of 100,000 files contained secrets. This is also not new: the coverage says bug reports raised it as early as August 2025, so the story is mainly that nothing was done. The coverage links no Apiiro report, so the numbers cannot be checked independently, and it is unclear how many of the leaked credentials were still live.

1. 01Whether Anthropic ships a fix, such as built-in secret scanning, masking of stored commands or a repo-level ignore default, and how soon after the Hacker News comments
2. 02Publication of Apiiro's full report and methodology, including how many leaked secrets were still valid and how the 215 scanner misses were counted
3. 03Whether gitleaks, TruffleHog or GitHub secret scanning add detection rules for this file, and whether the count of public repos containing it falls over the coming weeks