Alibaba reportedly bans employees from using Claude Code
Summary
Alibaba is banning its employees from using Claude Code (Anthropic's AI programming tool) starting July 10, 2026, reportedly because Anthropic has implemented restrictions on Chinese users. Anthropic had experimented with a version of Claude Code that could identify Chinese users to prevent unauthorized resellers and distillation (training AI models on outputs from other AI models), but the company says it has since developed stronger security measures and plans to remove this detection feature.
Solution / Mitigation
According to Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar, 'The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we've actually been meaning to take this down for a while.' The source does not specify what these stronger mitigations are or provide a timeline for their implementation.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/04/alibaba-reportedly-bans-employees-from-using-claude-code/
First tracked: July 4, 2026 at 02:00 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 85%