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Ban Starts July 10
Alibaba will prohibit employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code starting July 10, according to multiple reports, and the company has classified the tool as high-risk software.
“starting July 10”
The ban follows security concerns tied to Anthropic embedding a hidden feature in Claude Code that could identify Chinese users, and Alibaba has instructed staff to remove all of Anthropic’s model series, including Sonnet, Opus, and Fable, from their devices.
Alibaba said it would recommend its self-developed coding platform Qoder as an alternative tool, as the controversy escalated amid U.S.-China technology tensions.
Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said on X that the feature was “an experiment launched in March aimed at preventing account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protecting against distillation,” and he added that “the feature was slated for removal as stronger mitigations were subsequently introduced.”
Hidden Tracking Dispute
The dispute centers on claims that Claude Code could secretly track whether a user was based in China by reading system time zones such as Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi and by monitoring proxy servers or custom API addresses for keywords tied to major Chinese technology companies and AI labs.
In the version described as starting with 2.1.91, released in April 2026, the tool was said to alter the date format in system prompts from "2026-06-30" to "2026/06/30" and replace apostrophes with Unicode characters indistinguishable to the naked eye.
Alibaba’s internal notice, seen by the South China Morning Post, said: “Claude Code has recently been identified as having a back-door risk, and as a result of a comprehensive assessment, it has been added to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities.”
The South China Morning Post also reported that Alibaba said all staff members would be prohibited from using Claude Code in the office starting from July 10, after Anthropic’s earlier move to embed code could “secretly track whether a user was based in China or affiliated with a Chinese AI lab.”
Geopolitics and Tooling
Beyond the internal ban, the sources describe a broader fight over access and model use, with Anthropic alleging Alibaba engaged in “industrial-scale model distillation” and submitting a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee dated June 10.
“industrial-scale model distillation”
BigGo Finance reported that Anthropic claimed Alibaba used approximately 25,000 fake accounts to conduct over 28 million conversations with Claude between April 22 and June 5, framing the activity as distillation.
Alibaba’s move to migrate to Qoder is presented in the same reporting as part of a push toward its own AI ecosystem, while Anthropic’s restrictions on Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by those companies remain a key backdrop.
The South China Morning Post said the backlash followed the discovery of Anthropic’s covert practice by security researchers who posted their findings on platforms including Reddit and GitHub, and it noted Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
