Alibaba to block employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code as US-China AI rivalry deepens

Alibaba is preparing to ban employees from using Anthropic's AI coding assistant Claude Code, marking another sign of the widening divide between Chinese and American artificial intelligence ecosystems.

According to multiple media reports, the Chinese technology giant has categorised Claude Code as high-risk software and plans to prohibit its use internally from 10 July. Employees have reportedly been instructed to switch to Qoder, Alibaba's in-house AI programming tool, as the company's preferred alternative.

The reported decision comes against the backdrop of tightening restrictions on advanced AI technologies flowing between the US and China. While Alibaba is moving staff towards its own software, Anthropic has simultaneously been working to prevent Chinese organisations from accessing its models.

The US-based AI company already blocks Chinese firms, as well as overseas entities owned by Chinese companies, from using its AI products. Despite those restrictions, reports have suggested that users in China have continued to gain access through overseas cloud providers, resellers and foreign subsidiaries.

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The Information recently reported that Anthropic experimented with an additional layer of monitoring designed to identify whether users were operating from China or were linked to Chinese businesses. The report said the system, embedded in a version of Claude, was intended to help detect policy violations before the company later abandoned the approach.

Responding publicly, Anthropic executive Thariq Shihipar said the feature was only temporary and was never intended as a permanent measure.

"An experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation. The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we've actually been meaning to take this down for a while," Shihipar wrote on X.

The developments highlight how competition between US and Chinese AI companies is increasingly extending beyond model performance to include access controls, export rules and corporate security policies.

China's AI industry has gathered momentum in recent months with several companies introducing increasingly capable and lower-cost models aimed at challenging leading Western systems. One of the latest entrants is Beijing-based startup Z.ai, whose GLM-5.2 model has attracted attention in Silicon Valley for its coding capabilities and ability to carry out complex agentic tasks with minimal user input. Some industry observers have described its emergence as a "mini DeepSeek moment", reflecting growing confidence in China's domestic AI sector.

At the same time, US export controls have continued to shape the competitive landscape. Restrictions affecting access to some of Anthropic's latest AI models, including Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, have encouraged greater interest in Chinese alternatives among businesses seeking comparable capabilities. Earlier this month, however, Anthropic announced that the US Department of Commerce had lifted export restrictions that had applied to those two models, potentially easing access for some international customers while broader geopolitical tensions over AI technology continue.