Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code
China's Alibaba will prohibit employees from using Anthropic's programming tool Claude Code starting July 10, classifying it as high-risk software.
According to multiple reports, Chinese tech giant Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic's programming tool Claude Code starting July 10.
Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies and their foreign subsidiaries from using its models. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude. A recent Reddit post indicated that this effort included a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users.
Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar stated in a post on X that this was "an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation." Distillation is the practice of training AI models on the outputs of other models. "The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we've actually been meaning to take this down for a while," Shihipar added.
Nevertheless, Alibaba has classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company's own Qoder tool instead.
