Chinese technology giant Alibaba is set to prohibit its employees from utilizing Anthropic’s programming assistant, Claude Code, effective July 10. This directive comes amidst multiple reports circulating about the ban.
This move follows Anthropic's established policy, which already restricts Chinese companies, alongside foreign entities under their ownership, from accessing its AI models. The company has reportedly been actively engaged in efforts to seal off various loopholes that have previously allowed Chinese users to gain access to Claude.
A recent Reddit discussion brought to light that part of these loophole-closing measures involved a specific version of Claude Code capable of discreetly identifying Chinese users. Addressing this, Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar clarified in a post on X that this particular functionality was “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” Distillation, in this context, refers to the practice where one AI model is trained using the outputs generated by another.
Shihipar further noted, “The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while,” indicating the temporary nature and subsequent evolution of their protective measures.
Despite these explanations, Alibaba has reportedly designated Claude Code as a high-risk software. Consequently, the company is instructing its workforce to transition to its proprietary internal tool, Qoder, for their programming assistance needs.
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