Beijing: Chinese technology giant Alibaba has reportedly prohibited employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code for work, following concerns over features in the AI coding assistant that could help identify users linked to China.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Alibaba has instructed employees to switch to the company’s own AI-powered coding platform, Qoder, instead of Claude Code.
Claude Code is Anthropic’s artificial intelligence assistant designed to help software developers write and manage code. Despite Anthropic restricting access to users and organisations in China, the tool has gained significant popularity among Chinese programmers.
The reported move follows growing scrutiny over Claude Code after developers discovered mechanisms within the software that examined users’ environments, including timezone settings and proxy-related information, while embedding subtle markers into prompts sent to Anthropic’s servers.
Earlier this week, an Anthropic employee said on X that the feature had been introduced as an experiment in March to prevent account abuse by unauthorised resellers and to safeguard the company’s AI models from distillation.
The latest development also comes weeks after Anthropic accused Alibaba of unlawfully extracting the capabilities of its Claude AI models. As per the latest reports, the company described the alleged activity as the largest known model distillation attack it had encountered, claiming it could accelerate China’s ability to replicate the advanced capabilities of Anthropic’s Mythos Preview models.
The reported ban underscores growing tensions between global AI developers and Chinese technology companies as concerns over AI security, model protection, and cross-border access continue to intensify.
It also highlights the increasing push by major firms such as Alibaba to rely on in-house AI tools while geopolitical and regulatory scrutiny surrounding artificial intelligence continues to grow.
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