Alibaba has instructed employees to stop using Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code at work, according to a person familiar with the matter, as per a recent report by Reuters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As per the report, this is part of an escalating dispute between the two firms as the US and China jostle for dominance in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The ban, first reported by Chinese media, follows Anthropic\u2019s accusation last month that Alibaba had been illicitly extracting the capabilities of its Claude models through \u201cdistillation,\u201d a technique that trains a smaller system on a more powerful one\u2019s outputs. In a letter seen by Reuters, Anthropic told two US senators that Alibaba\u2019s effort was designed to accelerate its own progress toward matching the company\u2019s advanced Mythos Preview capabilities.<\/p>\n
The latest trigger came after developers discovered that Claude Code inspects user environments, checking details such as timezone and proxy settings, and embeds subtle markers into prompts sent to Anthropic\u2019s servers. An Anthropic employee confirmed on X on Tuesday that the functionality was \u201can experiment we launched in March\u201d aimed at preventing account abuse by unauthorised resellers and protecting against model distillation.<\/p>\n
A person familiar with Alibaba\u2019s order told Reuters that employees are being directed to use the company\u2019s own coding platform, Qoder, instead. The person noted that while Anthropic\u2019s China-related restrictions are hard to enforce on individuals who can route traffic through US-based servers, enterprises face greater legal and compliance exposure.<\/p>\n
Alibaba has not publicly addressed Anthropic\u2019s allegations, and both companies declined to comment to Reuters. The row comes as Chinese cloud and AI firms increasingly turn to domestic and open-source models, including DeepSeek, Alibaba\u2019s own Qwen, Moonshot, and Zhipu, even as Chinese AI models gain ground in the US market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alibaba has instructed employees to stop using Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code at work, according to a person familiar with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49991,53,3154,182,30304,49992],"class_list":["post-95653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-alibaba-bans-internal-corporate-use-of-anthropics-claude-code-following-escalating-disputes-over-model-distillation-tracking-and-hidden-user-tracking-mechanisms","tag-anthropic","tag-anthropic-claude","tag-claude","tag-qoder","tag-shifting-employees-to-its-in-house-alternative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}