Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant has been blacklisted by China’s Alibaba Group for use by its staff over data security concerns. The company worth $227.3 billion has flagged Claude’s American roots as “high-risk” after its codes were recently found tracking Chinese users upon being reversed engineered.
Starting June 10, Claude will lose visibility for Alibaba staff members, South Morning China Post reported on Friday.
Timeline of the tussle
Officially, Anthropic does not operate its AI services in China. However, Alibaba engineers were reportedly able to access them via virtual private networks (VPNs) to make it look like they were working from other locations.
On June 25, Anthropic accused Alibaba of illegally using Claude’s AI capabilities. In a letter adressed to U.S. Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, the AI company claimed that it has identified over 29 million conversations with Claude from the Alibaba network.
Calling it the largest extraction campaign so far, Anthropic asked the U.S. regulators to take action against the involved Alibaba entities and ensure that U.S.-native AI is not stolen by Chinese firms.
Reports indicate that Claude Code’s 2.1.91 software had started scanning timezones and proxy configurations to detect access attempts via Chinese networks. If a Chinese system setup was detected, the tool triggered a hidden “fingerprinting” process to secretly alert Anthropic’s backend servers — without the users getting to know about it.
This reported move by Anthropic is being labelled as corporate spyware — escalating the issue.
Following the development, China-based financial publication Yicai claimed that Alibaba had identified backdoor risks within Claude Code.
“As Claude Code was recently discovered to carry back-door risks, after comprehensive evaluation, Claude Code has now been added to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities,” Alibaba reportedly said in its internal notice.
The Beijing-based company has instead asked its employees to use Qoder, its own proprietary AI tool replacing Anthropic-based product.
As of now, Anthropic has not reacted to Alibaba’s ban on Claude.
OpenAI has also recently banned China-linked ChatGPT accounts as U.S. pushes to keep native AI technology homebound.
Tension escalations
Last month, JPMorgan’s Hong Kong office also resricted the use of Claude owing to some frictions in the licensing agreement.
At the time, an Anthropic spokesperson had confirmed to The Coin Headlines that its AI services have never officially supported in Hong Kong and China.
In April, Goldman Sachs had also taken a similar step and had removed Claude from the list of approved tools available to its Hong Kong-based bankers.
The race to establish dominance over the AI market has been getting intense globally, but more so between China and the U.S.
In May this year, U.S. President Donald Trump visited Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. The U.S. delegation included a high-profile entourage of American tech CEOsincluding Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang among others.
After the U.S. established its stronghold over AI hardware exports, China has started injecting state funding into fueling its domestic semiconductor pipeline.
