Alibaba Group Holding has banned its employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code at work, citing security risks related to the US AI company’s previous use of hidden code to track Chinese users – a move that has sparked widespread backlash in recent days.
“Since CloudCode was recently discovered to carry hidden risks, after a comprehensive evaluation, CloudCode has now been added to the list of high-risk software that contains security vulnerabilities,” Alibaba said on Thursday in an internal notice seen by the South China Morning Post.
The Chinese tech giant said that all employees will be banned from using Cloud Code in the office starting July 10.
The company was referring to Anthropic’s previous move to embed code in its Claude Code crypto proxy platform that could secretly track whether a user is based in China or affiliated with a Chinese AI lab, according to people familiar with the matter.
Alibaba, SCMP’s owner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic’s secretive practice was discovered earlier this week by security researchers, who posted their findings on platforms including Reddit and GitHub.
