Alibaba bans employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code

Alibaba, the Chinese technology conglomerate, will reportedly ban its employees from using Anthropic’s AI-powered programming tool, Claude Code, starting on July 10. According to multiple reports, the company has classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing its staff to transition to its internal coding assistant tool, Qoder, instead. The upcoming ban, set to take effect on July 10, represents a formal restriction within the company’s developer environment. By classifying the external tool as high-risk, Alibaba is forcing its employees to completely abandon Claude Code and rely solely on the company’s own Qoder software for programming tasks.

The decision aligns with Anthropic’s existing policy, which prohibits Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by them from accessing its models. Anthropic has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude. These restrictions are part of a broader effort by the AI developer to prevent unauthorized access to its models from within China.

According to a recent Reddit post, some of that loophole-closing involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar, a spokesperson for the company, addressed these findings in a post on X. Shihipar explained that this mechanism was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” Distillation is an AI model training technique where models are trained on the outputs of other models. Shihipar added that the team has since implemented stronger mitigations and had already been intending to remove the experiment for some time, indicating that the tracking experiment was a temporary measure that the company had already planned to phase out.

Why it matters

This move highlights the deepening divide in AI access, as Chinese tech giants increasingly restrict foreign AI tools in favor of internal alternatives amid ongoing geopolitical and security concerns.