China’s Alibaba will prohibit employees from utilizing Anthropic’s programming tool Claude Code starting July 10, according to multiple reports. Anthropic has already barred Chinese companies and foreign entities associated with them from using its models.
The company has been actively addressing loopholes allowing Chinese users to access Claude. A recent Reddit post suggested that part of this effort included a version of Claude Code designed to identify Chinese users covertly.
Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic stated in a post on X that the identification tool was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” Distillation refers to training AI models based on the outputs of other models.
Hi, this is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.
The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while. We merged the…
— Thariq (@trq212) June 30, 2026
Shihipar added that the team has implemented stronger mitigations since the experiment and indicated plans to deactivate the identification tool for a period. Despite these efforts, Alibaba has classified Claude Code as high-risk software.
In light of this classification, Alibaba is directing employees to instead utilize the company’s own programming tool, Qoder.
