Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code, effective July 10, the latest escalation in a bitter feud between two of the world’s most important AI companies.
The Chinese technology conglomerate has classified Claude Code as high-risk software after internal security audits flagged alleged embedded code that could identify users accessing the service from China, according to multiple reports from Reuters and Chinese financial outlet Yicai. Employees have been instructed to uninstall all Anthropic products from their work machines and migrate to Alibaba’s proprietary coding platform, Qoder.
The ban follows a Reddit post claiming that a version of Claude Code contained hidden mechanisms to detect Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar acknowledged the experiment on X, describing it as “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation,” the practice of training AI models on another model’s outputs. “The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while,” Shihipar said.
The Claude Code restriction does not exist in isolation. In late June, Anthropic accused Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of orchestrating what it called an “adversarial distillation” campaign, claiming the lab used approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate roughly 28.8 million interactions with Claude models between April and June 2026. Anthropic notified US senators and White House officials around June 24. The company has long prohibited commercial access to its models in China and has been working to close loopholes that allowed Chinese users to access Claude.
Anthropic already bans Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by them from using its models. The Alibaba ban effectively formalizes a reciprocal split: one of China’s largest technology companies is now steering its workforce away from a major US AI tool, citing security concerns that mirror Washington’s own anxieties about Chinese access to advanced AI.
For Alibaba, the move also serves a practical function, directing employees toward Qoder reduces reliance on foreign AI infrastructure at a time when Beijing is pushing for technological self-sufficiency. For Anthropic, the practical impact is limited since it already could not sell commercially in China. But the optics of a major Chinese firm publicly rejecting an American AI product over security allegations underscores the deepening fragmentation of the global AI supply chain.
Sources: Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code (TechCrunch, July 4, 2026); Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks (Reuters, July 3, 2026); Alibaba bans employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code over security risks (Crypto Briefing, July 3, 2026)