China’s Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code programming tool starting July 10, according to multiple information.
Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company has promised working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude.
According a recent post on redditPart of that loophole closure involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Thariq Shihipar of Anthropic said in a post on X that it was “an experiment we launched in March aimed at preventing account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protecting against distillation.” (Distillation It is a practice in which AI models are trained with the results of other models).
“The team has implemented stronger mitigations since then and we were actually intending to remove this for a while,” Shihipar said.
However, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing its employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool.
