Chinese tech giant Alibaba has banned its employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code for all work purposes, effective July 10, after security researchers alleged the AI coding agent contained hidden code designed to detect whether users were based in China or affiliated with Chinese AI labs. According to a July 3 South China Morning Post report, the Chinese tech giant said Claude Code had been "added to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities" following a comprehensive evaluation, citing what it described as back-door risks.
Employees have reportedly been instructed to adopt Qoder, Alibaba's in-house AI coding platform, as the replacement. According to reports from Chinese outlets citing company insiders, the directive reportedly goes further than Claude Code itself, as staff have allegedly been told to uninstall all Anthropic products, including the Sonnet, Opus, and Fable model families. The move is the latest escalation in a feud that ignited last month, when Anthropic accused operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab of running the largest known model distillation attack against Claude.
