alibaba Prohibits use by employees humanCNBC confirmed on Monday that the company’s artificial intelligence tools were not being used for business purposes as of July 10, citing concerns that the U.S. company had backdoor security risks.
The Chinese e-commerce giant has added Anthropic’s Claude code to its list of high-risk software, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss internal operations.
Alibaba’s move follows Anthropic’s decision in June to write a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, accusing the Chinese tech giant of trying to “brazenly” and “illegally” extract its AI capabilities. Anthropic accused Alibaba of carrying out the “largest known distillation attack” to date.
Anthropic’s terms of service prohibit Chinese companies and other “adversary countries” from using its model.
Alibaba employees will be required to uninstall all Anthropic models and agent products and use the Chinese company’s own AI assistant, Qoder, instead, the people said.
Alibaba and Antropic both declined to comment.
The ban comes amid a wave of online backlash against Anthropic in China after posts on Reddit and GitHub outlined the use of hidden code aimed at detecting whether a user might be based in China.
The Financial Times reported on Friday that Anthropic was moving to close loopholes that allowed Chinese companies to circumvent regulations and access Claude through third countries.
The British newspaper cited sources as saying that Chinese fintech group Ant “offered employees corporate Claude accounts that could be accessed through company intranets connected to the Singapore-based company.”
The FT reported that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, while not “facilitating access to Claude,” has launched a reimbursement program that allows engineers to cover the cost of individual subscriptions. Engineers can access these subscriptions on a virtual private network.
Ant and ByteDance declined to comment on the Financial Times report.
ByteDance’s reimbursement policy, announced on April 2, is aimed at encouraging employees to “experience and learn” about a wide range of AI products to improve their skills, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person requested anonymity to discuss internal policy.
