By Kashmira Konduparty
Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, has banned employees from using Anthropic’s AI-powered coding assistant Claude Code in workplace environments, citing alleged security risks involving embedded “backdoors,” according to a person familiar with the matter. The restriction will take effect July 10 and comes amid escalating tensions between the two companies over artificial intelligence security and intellectual property.
Alibaba has instructed employees to stop using Claude Code for work and instead adopt Qoder, Alibaba’s in-house AI coding platform, the source said.
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The decision follows reports from developers who claimed Claude Code contained mechanisms capable of inspecting users’ computing environments, including time zone and proxy settings, to identify whether users were operating from China or associated with Chinese organizations. Some researchers described the functionality as a potential “backdoor,” raising concerns among Chinese technology firms about data security and surveillance.
Anthropic has disputed that characterization. A company employee wrote this week on the social media platform X that the feature was introduced as an experiment in March to combat unauthorized account resellers and prevent model distillation — the practice of training one AI model using the outputs of another. The employee said the mechanism would be removed in a future software update.
READ: Anthropic accuses Alibaba of massive AI ‘distillation’ attack (June 25, 2026)
The latest dispute deepens a growing rift between Anthropic and Alibaba. Last month, Anthropic accused operators affiliated with Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of conducting what it described as the largest known campaign to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude models. According to Anthropic, the operation involved nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts generating more than 28 million interactions with Claude between April and June in an effort to distill the company’s technology. Alibaba has denied wrongdoing and has not publicly addressed the allegations in detail.
Claude Code has become one of the most widely used AI coding assistants among software developers, including many in China who accessed the service despite Anthropic’s restrictions on users in the country. The ban of Claude Code at Alibaba’s workplace signals that Chinese companies are increasingly favoring domestic AI development tools as geopolitical tensions and technology restrictions reshape the global AI industry.