Alibaba to ban employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code starting July 10

Alibaba will prohibit employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code programming tool starting July 10, 2026, according to multiple reports. The Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant has classified the AI-powered coding assistant as high-risk software and is directing staff to switch to its own internal tool, Qoder.

The move comes amid broader restrictions by Anthropic on access to its models. The San Francisco-based AI company already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its technology. In recent months, Anthropic has been working to close loopholes that enabled Chinese users to access Claude through unauthorized resellers.

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Anthropic’s anti-abuse experiment

According to a recent Reddit post, some of Anthropic’s efforts involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar addressed the issue in a post on X, describing it as “an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” Distillation refers to the practice where AI models are trained on the outputs of other models, a technique that raises intellectual property concerns for companies like Anthropic.

“The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while,” Shihipar said, referring to the identification experiment.

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Alibaba pushes internal alternative

Alibaba’s ban applies to Claude Code specifically, and the company is promoting its own Qoder tool as the approved alternative for employees. Qoder is part of Alibaba’s broader AI development efforts, which include its Tongyi Qianwen large language model family.

The development highlights the growing fragmentation of the AI tools market, particularly between U.S.-based AI companies and Chinese technology firms. As geopolitical tensions continue to influence technology access, companies on both sides are increasingly developing in-house alternatives to foreign software.

Neither Alibaba nor Anthropic have issued formal statements about the ban beyond the reports circulating in Chinese media and technology forums.

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