China’s Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool Claude Code starting on July 10, according to multiple reports. Anthropic prohibits Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by those companies from using its models.
The company has been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude. A recent Reddit post indicated that some of this loophole-closing involved a version of Claude Code that could identify Chinese users.
Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar stated in a post on X that this process was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.”
Shihipar added, “The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while.”
Despite these developments, Alibaba has classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is directing employees to utilize the company’s own Qoder tool instead.
