Why Alibaba has banned staff from using Claude Code
What's the story
Alibaba Group has banned its employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code in the workplace. The decision comes amid security concerns over the US artificial intelligence (AI) firm's alleged use of hidden code to track Chinese users. The move has drawn widespread criticism in recent days. "Claude Code has now been added to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities," Alibaba said in an internal notice seen by South China Morning Post.
Implementation
Ban on Claude Code use in office
Alibaba has said that all employees will be banned from using Claude Code in the office starting July 10. The decision comes after Anthropic's earlier move to embed code into its Claude Code coding agent platform, which could secretly track whether a user was based in China or affiliated with a Chinese AI lab.
Theft accusations
Alibaba attempted to illegally extract Claude capabilities
The ban comes after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illegally extracting its Claude AI model capabilities. The US-based company described the incident as the largest known attack of its kind against them. It was a "distillation" effort, where a less capable model is trained on the outputs of a stronger one, according to Anthropic. The campaign was carried out between April 22 and June 5, generating over 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through nearly 25,000 fake accounts.
Espionage claims
China accused of stealing US AI labs' IP
In February, Anthropic had flagged a campaign by Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illegally extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform. A letter detailing the Alibaba attack was sent to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren ahead of a scheduled hearing on AI. In April, the White House had accused China of stealing US-based AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale.