The workplace ban, starting July 10, lands weeks after Anthropic accused operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen lab of running the largest known distillation campaign against Claude.
Alibaba will bar its employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code inside workplace environments from July 10, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters.
The stated reason is an alleged backdoor built into the coding tool, though Alibaba has not confirmed the move publicly and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ban was first reported by the Chinese financial outlet Yicai before Reuters corroborated it through its own source. It arrives at an already tense moment for Anthropic and Alibaba, whose AI units have spent the past two months accusing each other of bad behaviour, first over alleged model theft and now over an alleged spying mechanism baked into Claude’s own tooling.
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