Alibaba has officially banned all employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code programming tool, classifying it as high-risk software and instructing staff to uninstall every Anthropic product from company devices starting today. Employees are being directed to use Alibaba's own AI coding assistant, Qoder, instead. The ban escalates a deepening confrontation between the two companies. In June, Anthropic sent a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee accusing Alibaba of carrying out "the largest known distillation attack" to date, alleging that the Chinese tech giant had "brazenly" and "illicitly" attempted to extract its AI capabilities. [1]
Distillation refers to the practice of training one AI model on the outputs of another. Anthropic's terms of service already prohibit Chinese companies and other entities from "adversarial nations" from using its models. The situation grew more complicated last month when posts on Reddit and GitHub described hidden code in Claude Code designed to detect whether users were based in China. Anthropic acknowledged the code as a March experiment aimed at preventing account abuse and model distillation by unauthorized resellers, and said stronger mitigations have since replaced it. The Financial Times reported that other Chinese firms, including Ant Group and ByteDance, have also found workarounds to access Claude through third countries or employee reimbursement programs. Neither Alibaba nor Anthropic commented publicly on the ban.