Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code | TechCrunch

Posted:China’s Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s programming tool Claude Code, starting on July 10, according to multiple]($1) reports]($1). Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes]($1) that allow Chinese users to access Claude.According to a recent Reddit post]($1), some of that loophole-closing involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said in a post on X]($1) that this was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” (Distillation is 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.Topics Last chance to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit. Join 1,000+ founders and VCs at all stages for real-world scaling insights and connections that move the needle.

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