China’s Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool Claude Code starting July 10, according to multiple reports.
Anthropic already bans Chinese companies and foreign companies it owns from using its model. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes that would have allowed Chinese users to access Claud.
According to a recent Reddit post, closing the loophole involved a version of the Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said in a post about (Distillation is how an AI model is trained on the output of another model.)
“The team has since taken stronger mitigation measures and has actually been trying to address this issue for some time,” Shihipar said.
Nonetheless, Alibaba is reportedly classifying Claude Code as high-risk software and instructing employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead.
