China's Alibaba plans to ban employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work over concerns about potential security risks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The move comes in the wake of a post on online forum Reddit earlier this week alleging that a version of the software released in April contained code that could identify users who accessed it from China.
In a response to the allegations in the report, Thariq Shihipar, who works on Claude Code, said on X on Wednesday that the code was part of an experiment Anthropic launched in March "meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation."
Anthropic has accused Alibaba and several other Chinese AI labs of illicitly distilling its models--the practice of training models on the outputs of another. In February, Anthropic said it found that some senior staff of Chinese labs were likely behind some accounts that had distilled its models based on the information of the accounts' activities.
The U.S. company has restricted access to Claude in China on national security grounds, though the tool is still popular among Chinese researchers and engineers.
Alibaba has classified Claude Code as "high-risk software" following the Reddit report, the people said. Staff won't be allowed to use it from July 10, they said.
Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 03, 2026 07:20 ET (11:20 GMT)
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