Alibaba Bans Claude Code; Anthropic Closes China Loopholes
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- Alibaba banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code and ordered them to remove all Claude models from work computers, per a source cited by The Information, Reuters, and the South China Morning Post.
- The internal directive cites alleged backdoor and spyware risks; a Poe Zhao tweet citing the memo sets the effective date at July 10, with Alibaba's own Qoder coding tool as the replacement.
- Anthropic is moving in parallel to close loopholes that let Chinese companies—including Ant—access Claude via cloud providers and overseas subsidiaries, the Financial Times reports.
- Dare Obasanjo on Bluesky frames the dispute as mutual: 'Anthropic has both admitted to spyware in Claude Code designed to identify Chinese users and has accused Alibaba of using distillation to reverse engineer Claude.'
- Poe Zhao on X flags the awkward subtext: since Anthropic does not officially serve users in China, the ban itself 'confirms Alibaba had been tolerating unauthorized usage' all along.
Why it matters: Alibaba's ban and Anthropic's parallel crackdown close the remaining paths Chinese firms had to Claude—including indirect access via subsidiaries like Ant. With Alibaba directing staff to its own Qoder coding tool, the episode ends a period of tolerated unofficial use and replaces it with a domestic AI coding stack inside one of China's largest tech companies.
