Alibaba bans employees from using Claude; Anthropic accuses Chinese giant of model distillation
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has ordered its staff to stop using Anthropic's Claude Code tool after it was found to be flagging users connecting from China. Anthropic, which was already trying to block Chinese firms from accessing Claude, accuses Alibaba of operating around 25,000 fake accounts to distill its AI models.
Alibaba, the Chinese technology conglomerate, has issued an internal directive prohibiting its employees from using Claude Code, an AI coding assistant developed by the American company Anthropic. The move comes after the tool started flagging users who connected from China, raising security and compliance concerns.
Meanwhile, Anthropic—the company behind the Claude AI models—has been actively trying to prevent Chinese companies from using its technology. Now, Anthropic formally accuses Alibaba of running a large-scale "distillation" campaign, a process where one AI model is trained using the outputs of another.
According to Anthropic, Alibaba deployed approximately 25,000 fake user accounts to extract data from Claude and use it to train its own AI models. This practice violates Anthropic's terms of service and is seen as an attempt to replicate Claude's capabilities without authorization.
Alibaba has not yet publicly responded to the allegations. The dispute highlights growing tensions between Chinese and Western tech firms, particularly over intellectual property rights and data security in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence sector.
