Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code

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

Anthropic already bans Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company reportedly has been working to close loopholes in the law which allows Chinese users to access Claude.

According to a recent Reddit postpart of that loophole involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic said in a post on X that this was “an experiment we launched in March designed to prevent and protect against distillation account abuse by unauthorized resellers.” (Distillation is a practice of training AI models on the results of other models.)

“The team has since taken stronger measures and we had actually been planning to do away with this for a while,” Shihipar said.

Nevertheless, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead.