Alibaba bans Claude internally, effective July 10

Alibaba has banned all internal use of Anthropic's Claude products, including Sonnet, Opus, Fable models and Claude Code agent tools, effective July 10. Previously, employees could freely use external models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini, with some programmers spending hundreds of dollars weekly.

The ban follows reports that Claude Code had built-in detection targeting Chinese users. Since April, the tool would check system timezone for Chinese zones and URL lists including Chinese tech companies like Baidu and ByteDance, encoding results in system prompts.

Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar said the feature was an experimental measure from March 2026 to prevent unauthorized reselling and model distillation. While the code was removed in a July 2 update, Alibaba has decided to cut off Claude access.