Alibaba Bans Staff Use of Anthropic Claude Code After Tool Flagged China Connections

Alibaba has ordered its employees to stop using Anthropic's Claude Code coding tool. The directive followed detection that the tool inspected user timezone and proxy information to flag connections originating from China and inserted subtle markers. Employees were told to use Alibaba's internal Qoder platform as the replacement.

The ban was first reported by Chinese media. Anthropic stated that Alibaba had deployed around 25,000 fake accounts to train its own models on Claude outputs. The company described the activity as a distillation strike in a letter sent to two U.S.

Senators. Anthropic employee said on X that the flagging feature was an experiment launched in March to curb abuse and distillation attempts.