Alibaba has ordered its employees to stop using Anthropic’s Claude Code, citing security vulnerabilities that allegedly include embedded backdoors capable of identifying users linked to China. The ban takes effect July 10, 2026, and staff must uninstall all Claude products and migrate to Alibaba’s proprietary coding platform, Qoder.
The directive doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It arrives in the middle of a genuinely messy feud between two of the world’s most important AI companies, one that now involves US senators, the White House, and accusations of industrial-scale model theft.
A feud that escalated fast
In late June 2026, Anthropic accused Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of orchestrating what it called an “adversarial distillation” attack. Anthropic claims Qwen used 25,000 fraudulent accounts to systematically extract knowledge from Claude’s most advanced models.
The alleged attack generated 28.8 million interactions with Claude models over the span of just a few weeks, running from roughly April through June 2026.
