I’ve been using Claude Code for my latest project, an online visual perception study. It’s been working great since the project size is small and I know just enough JavaScript/HTML/CSS to review everything and sometimes even contribute my own code.
At some point, I noticed that Claude was listed on my project’s GitHub page as a contributor. I had already mentioned using Claude in my doc files, but it seemed a bit much to have it as a contributor, implying some kind of autonomy.
It turns out, when you ask Claude to make a commit for you, it appends a “Co-Authored-By: Claude ...” line to the commit text, which GitHub recognizes as metadata and updates your repo’s contributor list. Ironically, the only change that I asked Claude to commit was to move some files to another folder — no actual authoring involved!
How to remove the contributor
You can turn off Claude’s use of co-authored-by with a documented setting. However, that only applies to future commits. Removing the contributor required two steps.
Remove the co-authored-by comment
I don’t know git and I had Claude do this part. Basically, it removed the text from the local git commit history, and then had me do a “git push --force“. (It didn’t have the credentials to do it itself.) The actual commands have been buried by Claude’s context compaction, but I did copy out the following command in case it’s useful to anyone (15387b3 is the commit ID)
Bash(git stash && FILTER_BRANCH_SQUELCH_WARNING=1 git filter-branch --msg-filter 'sed "/^Co-Authored-By:/d"' 15387b3^..HEAD && git stash pop)After I force-pushed the new history, I could confirm the newly trimmed commit comments were in GitHub, but the contributor list was unchanged.
Refresh the contributor list
I left the repo alone for a few days, but the contributor list didn’t fix itself. Instead, I had to resort to a trick I found on StackOverflow: rename the branch to something else and then rename it back to the original name. That’s not suitable for every repo because the rename breaks some connections, but it was fine for my newish repo. Hopefully, there’s a better way that established repos can use.
3 million commits
Searching GitHub for Claude’s commits shows 3 million commits, so this is a widespread issue. Larger repos probably don’t even notice it since only the first 15 or so contributors are listed on the main page.
One response to “Removing accidental Claude”
There’s nothing to “fix” here. Listing an LLM as a contributor on the project serves as a convenient disclaimer to would-be users and collaborators about its mode of production.