Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code

China's Alibaba will reportedly ban employees from using Anthropic's programming tool Claude Code, starting on July 10. This follows Anthropic's existing prohibition on Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by those companies from using its models. Anthropic has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude. 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 said on X that this was an experiment launched in March to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation, a practice where AI models are trained on the outputs of other models. Shihipar noted that the team has since landed stronger mitigations. As a result of the ban, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company's own Qoder tool instead.