Alibaba bans employees from using Claude Code as feud with Anthropic deepens

Chinese technology company Alibaba has instructed its employees not to use Anthropic's AI coding assistant Claude Code for work after concerns were raised over features that could identify users linked to China, Reuters cited. Employees have instead been asked to use Alibaba's in-house coding platform, Qoder.The move adds to the growing dispute between the two companies. Last month, Anthropic accused Alibaba of carrying out a large scale "distillation" effort, alleging that the Chinese company trained a less capable AI model using outputs generated by Claude. Anthropic outlined the allegation in a letter sent to two US senators that was reviewed by Reuters. Alibaba has not publicly responded to those accusations.Claude Code is Anthropic's AI assistant designed for software developers. Despite Anthropic's restrictions on access by users and organisations in China, the tool has remained widely used by programmers in the country, the source said.The latest development follows reports from developers that Claude Code included mechanisms capable of examining parts of a user's environment, including timezone and proxy-related information, while adding markers to prompts sent back to Anthropic's servers. An Anthropic employee said in a post on X that the feature was introduced as an experiment in March to curb abuse by unauthorised resellers and to protect the company's models from distillation.The report said that while individual users could bypass some of Anthropic's restrictions by routing internet traffic through servers outside China, companies faced greater legal and compliance concerns.As AI companies in the United States tighten measures to prevent unauthorised access, resale and model distillation, Chinese cloud and AI firms are increasingly turning to domestic and open source models, including Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot and Zhipu. At the same time, Chinese AI models are gaining a presence in the US market, raising concerns among some industry experts. Alibaba's workplace ban was first reported by Chinese media outlets.