Claude Code's complicated China problem involves bans on both sides of the Pacific
Summary
Anthropic is trying to block Chinese companies like ByteDance and Ant Financial from accessing Claude Code, but they're getting around the restrictions through VPNs and overseas subsidiaries.
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Claude Code's complicated China problem involves bans on both sides of the Pacific
Matthias Bastian[View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthias-bastian-128b71b1/ "View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian")
Jul 3, 2026
Anthropic is trying to stop Chinese companies from accessing Claude Code, theFinancial Timesreports. The company's terms of serviceexplicitly ban sales to companies controlled by China. But companies like Ant Financial and ByteDance are getting around the restrictions through cloud services, overseas subsidiaries in Singapore, or VPNs.
Meanwhile, Alibaba is banning its own employees from using Claude Code and requiring them to delete all Claude models,The Information reports. The ban followsreports of hidden code in Claude Codethat could flag users based in China or linked to a Chinese lab.Anthropic's Thariq Shihiparcalled itan experiment from Marchto stop account abuse and distillation, adding that stronger safeguards have since replaced it.
Anthropic has previously accusedAlibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of using Claude for distillation, training their own smaller models on Claude's outputs.
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Source:The Information\|Financial Times
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