Claude Code: Rising Tensions Between Anthropic and China

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Key Takeaways

1Anthropic is seeking to block Chinese companies' access to Claude Code, but they are using VPNs to bypass these restrictions.

2ByteDance and Ant Financial are among the Chinese companies that manage to access Claude Code despite the bans.

3Alibaba has prohibited its employees from using Claude Code after discovering hidden code identifying Chinese users.

💡Why it matters — These tensions illustrate the growing challenges for tech companies in light of security and digital sovereignty issues between the United States and China.

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Full Analysis

Claude Code: Rising Tensions Between Anthropic and China

The complex issue of Claude Code with China involves bans on both sides of the Pacific.

Anthropic is attempting to prevent Chinese companies from accessing Claude Code, according to the Financial Times. The company's terms of service explicitly prohibit sales to companies controlled by China. However, companies like Ant Financial and ByteDance are circumventing these restrictions through cloud services, foreign subsidiaries in Singapore, or VPNs.

At the same time, Alibaba is prohibiting its own employees from using Claude Code and requires them to delete all Claude models, reports The Information. This ban follows reports concerning hidden code in Claude Code that could signal users based in China or linked to a Chinese lab. Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic described this as an experiment conducted in March to stop account abuse and distillation, adding that stricter security measures have since replaced it.

Anthropic has previously accused Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of using Claude for distillation, resulting in their own smaller models based on Claude's outputs.

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