Alibaba has reportedly decided to ban its employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool, Claude Code, beginning on July 10. The move comes as part of broader efforts to restrict access to the tool by Chinese entities. Anthropic has already barred Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by them from using its models. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude Code.
According to a recent Reddit post, some of the loophole-closing efforts involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar stated in a post on X that this was 'an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.' Distillation refers to the practice where AI models are trained on the outputs of other models. Shihipar added that 'the team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while.'
Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead. Source: techcrunch
