China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has reportedly decided to prohibit its employees from using Anthropic’s coding assistant, Claude Code, starting July 10, according to multiple sources. Anthropic already restricts access to its models for Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by them. The company has been actively closing loopholes that allowed Chinese users to bypass these restrictions. A recent Reddit post revealed that part of this effort involved a version of Claude Code designed to secretly detect Chinese users. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic clarified 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 refers to the practice of training AI models using outputs from 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. Despite these measures, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is directing its employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead.