Alibaba to Reportedly Ban Claude Code Use Across Its Workplace Starting July 10

Alibaba is reportedly preparing to ban employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code. The news comes via Reuters, which, in the report cites a person familiar with the matter and notes that Alibaba will block employees from using Claude Code in workplace environments starting July 10.

Anthropic’s Claude Code faces new blow

The report says the company has classified Anthropic’s AI coding assistant as high-risk software and is instead directing staff to use Qoder. For those unaware, it’s Alibaba’s own AI-powered coding tool.

The reported move comes only days after developers claimed they had discovered hidden mechanisms inside Claude Code that inspected user environments, including timezone and proxy-related information. The findings, first highlighted in a Reddit post, raised concerns that the tool could identify users attempting to access Claude from restricted regions.

Anthropic has acknowledged the existence of the mechanism but disputed the interpretation surrounding it. Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar took to X (FKA Twitter) and said the feature was introduced as an experiment in March to combat unauthorized resellers and prevent AI model distillation, where one model is trained using the outputs of another.

He added that stronger protections have since replaced it and that the company had already planned to remove the experiment. Speaking of distillation, the reported ban also comes shortly after Anthropic accused operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI division of conducting what it described as the largest known attempt to extract Claude’s capabilities through fraudulent accounts.

That being said, neither Alibaba nor Anthropic has officially responded on the reported workplace restriction. For now, the reported July 10 deadline and the internal shift toward Qoder remain based on reporting from Reuters and Chinese outlet Yicai.