Anthropic has implemented restrictions to prevent Chinese companies from accessing Claude Code, according to the Financial Times. The company’s terms of service explicitly prohibit sales to entities controlled by China. Despite these measures, firms like Ant Financial and ByteDance have found ways to bypass the restrictions through cloud services, overseas subsidiaries in Singapore, or VPNs. This has created a complex situation where both sides of the Pacific are imposing bans on the model.
Alibaba has also banned its employees from using Claude Code, requiring them to delete all instances of the model, as reported by The Information. The ban follows allegations of hidden code in Claude Code that could flag users based in China or linked to a Chinese lab. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar described the code as an experiment from March aimed at preventing account abuse and distillation, stating that stronger safeguards have since replaced it. The company has previously accused Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of using Claude for distillation, training their own smaller models on its outputs.
The situation highlights the growing tensions in the global AI landscape, with major players on both sides of the Pacific taking measures to control access to sensitive technologies. These actions reflect broader concerns over data security, intellectual property, and geopolitical influence in the AI industry.
Source: thedecoder
