Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, will prohibit its staff from using the programming tool Claude Code developed by Anthropic, effective July 10, as per various reports.
Anthropic has already restricted access to its models for Chinese firms and foreign companies linked to them. The organization has been actively working to eliminate ways for users in China to utilize Claude’s services.
A recent discussion on Reddit highlighted that some of the efforts to close these access loopholes included a version of Claude Code designed to secretly identify users from China. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic mentioned on X that this was part of an “experiment launched in March aimed at preventing misuse by unauthorized resellers and guarding against distillation,” which refers to a method where AI systems are trained using the outputs of other systems.
Shihipar added that the team has since implemented stronger measures and intended to remove this specific identification tool for some time.
Despite this, Alibaba has deemed Claude Code as high-risk software and is advising its employees to switch to using their proprietary tool, Qoder, instead.
