Alibaba Reportedly Restricts Employees From Using Claude Code AI Tool

Alibaba is reportedly introducing a company-wide restriction on the use of Anthropic’s AI programming assistant, Claude Code, with the ban expected to take effect on July 10, according to multiple media reports.

Anthropic already prevents companies based in China, as well as overseas organisations owned or controlled by Chinese firms, from accessing its AI models. The company has also been working to tighten enforcement and eliminate methods that have allowed some users in China to continue accessing Claude despite those restrictions.

One example of those efforts surfaced in a recent Reddit post, which claimed that a version of Claude Code could quietly identify users in China. Responding to the discussion on X, Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar explained that the feature was part of an internal experiment introduced in March.

According to Shihipar, the experiment was designed to combat abuse by unauthorised resellers and protect the company’s models against distillation, a technique in which one AI model is trained on the outputs of another.

“The team has landed stronger mitigations since then, and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while,” Shihipar wrote.

Despite Anthropic’s ongoing efforts, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software within the company. Employees are instead being instructed to use Alibaba’s own AI-assisted coding platform, Qoder, for software development and programming tasks.

The reported move reflects the growing divide between global AI providers and Chinese technology companies as export controls, security concerns, and access restrictions continue to reshape the competitive landscape for advanced AI development tools.