Anthropic bans China, but Alibaba bans Anthropic
anthropic blocked chinese firms from using its code model, while alibaba banned its employees from it after discovering hidden flags. it highlights the growing fragmentation and geopolitical tension in the global ai infrastructure.
anthropic is blocking chinese companies from using claude code through explicit terms of service bans, yet firms like ant financial and bytedance access the model via cloud loopholes and overseas subsidiaries. concurrently, alibaba issued a company-wide ban on claude code, requiring employees to delete instances, following the discovery of hidden code that flagged chinese users to prevent distillation. anthropic confirmed the code was an obsolete anti-abuse experiment and denied it is currently active. this exchange signals a hardening stance in ai geopolitics, where us labs aggressively protect ip and chinese entities scrutinize foreign tools for security risks.