Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) will reportedly ban employees from using Anthropic’s (NASDAQ:ANTP) Claude Code in its workplace systems from July 10 over alleged security concerns, according to a Reuters report citing a person familiar with the matter.
The decision follows a report by Chinese financial publication Yicai, which claimed that Alibaba had identified what it described as embedded “backdoor” risks within the AI-powered coding assistant.
Shares of Alibaba listed in Hong Kong fell 0.7%, underperforming the broader Hang Seng Index, which gained 1.3% during the session.
The reported restriction comes as relations between Alibaba and Anthropic have become increasingly strained in recent weeks. Last month, Anthropic alleged that individuals linked to Alibaba and its Qwen artificial intelligence division carried out a large-scale effort to extract capabilities from Claude models using fraudulent accounts. Alibaba has not publicly responded to those allegations.
Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI software development assistant, has become one of the most widely adopted coding tools in the industry. However, access to Anthropic’s most advanced AI models has attracted increasing regulatory attention. Last week, the U.S. government partially reinstated access to the company’s flagship models for a limited number of trusted organizations after previously imposing temporary restrictions over national security concerns.
Alibaba continues to expand its Qwen family of large language models as competition intensifies with domestic AI developers including DeepSeek, Tencent and Baidu. At the same time, Anthropic has strengthened protections around the Claude platform in response to growing concerns over model distillation and unauthorized cross-border use.