Alibaba bans employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work

Alibaba has banned employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code at work, with the restriction set to take effect on July 10. The Chinese tech giant told staff to use its own coding platform, Qoder, instead, after Claude Code drew scrutiny over features that could help identify China-linked users.

The move lands at a tense moment for two of the AI industry’s most closely watched companies. Anthropic has accused Alibaba of improperly extracting capabilities from its Claude model, and Alibaba has not publicly responded to those accusations. Neither company immediately commented on the workplace ban.

Claude Code is not a simple chatbot. Anthropic describes it as an agentic coding system that can read a codebase, make changes across files, run tests, and deliver committed code. That kind of access has made coding assistants attractive to developers, including many in China, even as Anthropic says it does not currently offer commercial access to Claude in China.

Anthropic’s regional policy also gives it broad discretion to deny commercial access to entities whose ownership is attributable to unsupported regions such as China, even when those companies operate elsewhere. In February 2026, Anthropic said it identified industrial-scale distillation campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax that generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through about 24,000 fraudulent accounts, using proxy services to evade regional restrictions.

The company has also tied Claude Code to cybersecurity concerns beyond model theft. In June 2026, Anthropic said it detected a Chinese state-sponsored campaign that used Claude Code in AI-orchestrated espionage attempts against roughly 30 global targets, including tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers and government agencies.

Taken together, those episodes help explain why a workplace ban can move so quickly from product policy to security policy. For Alibaba, blocking a foreign coding assistant inside the company and steering employees toward Qoder reflects more than a preference for domestic software. It shows how AI tools are becoming part of a broader contest over data governance, access controls and corporate trust, with U.S. and Chinese ecosystems pulling further apart as the technology spreads into everyday business operations.