Alibaba to ban employees from using Anthropic's coding tool, source says

BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Alibaba has banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work after the tool drew scrutiny for code that can help identify China-linked users, according to a person familiar with the order.

Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding assistant for software developers. It has become popular among programmers in China despite Anthropic's restrictions on access by users and entities in China.

The person said that Alibaba employees were being told to use the company's own coding platform Qoder.

Alibaba and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Anthropic last month accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities in what ​it said was the largest known attack of its kind on the company, according to a ‌letter seen by Reuters.

The ​distillation helps accelerate China's ability to reach Anthropic's advanced Mythos ⁠Preview capabilities, it said in the letter.

The ban comes just days after developers said Claude Code contained mechanisms that inspected user environments, including timezone and proxy-related information, and inserted subtle markers into prompts sent to Anthropic's servers.

An Anthropic employee wrote on Tuesday (June 30) on X that the feature was "an experiment we launched in March" intended to prevent account abuse by unauthorised resellers and protect against model distillation.

Alibaba's ban was earlier reported by Chinese media outlets.

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