Redesigning source control at Anthropic

Anthropic has built its own version‑control system, called Scion, to replace Git as the volume of code changes exploded. According to internal data, the company was integrating roughly 2,500 commits per day in May 2026, a figure that surged to more than 30,000 daily in September, coinciding with the release of several AI models such as Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Mythos Preview and Fable 5. The new tool introduces “Antique,” a code‑review mechanism that largely supplants traditional pull requests. Scion is designed as a centralized version‑control system, similar to Subversion, and meets extreme requirements: the main branch history occupies about 100 GB, a compressed working copy exceeds 25 GB, and the company performs roughly 25 million code pulls per day for continuous integration. Using Git naïvely would generate over 600 PB of daily traffic. A team of seven engineers completed the migration in five months. The team notes that most Scion usage is online, so offline capacity was not a priority, and that adversarial review assisted by models like Claude has been key to maintaining quality, though it still requires oversight by experienced engineers.

This story is significant because it illustrates how large‑scale AI developers may need to rethink foundational infrastructure such as version control to manage unprecedented data volumes and development speed, potentially influencing future technology choices across the industry.

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