Chinese technology giant Alibaba will officially ban its employees from using Anthropic’s AI programming assistant, Claude Code, from 10 July following security concerns over potential backdoor vulnerabilities, according to multiple industry reports.
Anthropic’s crackdown on Chinese access
US-based AI safety startup Anthropic explicitly restricts Chinese corporations, alongside any foreign subsidiaries they control, from accessing its generative models. Consequently, the firm has been actively working to close loopholes that previously enabled users based in mainland China to bypass these restrictions and utilise Claude’s capabilities.
The secret user-tracking experiment
This enforcement strategy recently sparked controversy. According to a recent Reddit post, a specific build of Claude Code contained hidden mechanisms designed to covertly identify and flag users operating within China. Addressing the allegations, Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said in a post on X that the feature was merely “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.”
Distillation refers to the controversial industry practice where rival developers train their own AI models using the outputs generated by superior competing systems.
Shihipar further clarified the situation, stating, “The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while.”
Alibaba pivots to proprietary AI solutions
Despite Anthropic’s explanations, the revelation has prompted immediate defensive action from Hangzhou. Alibaba has officially categorised Claude Code as high-risk software, ordering its engineering and development teams to completely phase out the tool and migrate exclusively to Qoder, Alibaba’s own proprietary coding assistant.