AI NewsAlibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code

Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code

5:54 AM IST · July 5, 2026

China’s Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool Claude Code, starting on July 10, according tomultiplereports. Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company has reportedly beenworking to close loopholesthat allow Chinese users to access Claude. According toa recent Reddit post, some of that loophole-closing involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihiparsaid in a post on Xthat this was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” (Distillationis a practice where AI models are trained 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 said. Nonetheless, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead.