China’s Alibaba will ban its employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code programming tool starting July 10, according to multiple reports.

Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude.

According to a recent Reddit post, part of that loophole closure involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said in a post on X that this was “an experiment we launched in March that aimed to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” (Distillation is a practice in which AI models are trained with the results of other models.)

“The team has implemented stronger mitigations since then and we were actually intending to remove this for a while,” Shihipar said.

However, Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code as high-risk software and is instructing employees to use the company’s own Qoder tool.