Alibaba Reportedly Prohibits Employees from Using Claude Code

China’s Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool, Claude Code, starting July 10, according to several reports.

Anthropic has already prohibited Chinese companies, along with foreign entities linked to them, from using its models. The firm is reportedly working on removing any loopholes that enable Chinese users to access Claude.

A recent Reddit post revealed that some measures to close these loopholes include a version of Claude Code designed to discreetly identify Chinese users. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic noted in a post on X that this was “an experiment we launched in March aimed at preventing account misuse by unauthorized resellers and safeguarding against distillation.” (Distillation is the process whereby AI models are trained using the outputs of other models.)

“Since then, the team has implemented stronger safeguards, and we’ve actually intended to remove this for quite some time,” Shihipar stated.

Nonetheless, Alibaba has deemed Claude Code as high-risk software and is advising employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead.