{"id":736921,"date":"2026-07-04T03:40:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T00:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T03:40:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T00:40:24","slug":"alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"Alibaba bans Claude Code over hidden Chinese user tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a4ca9cf0b970\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a4ca9cf0b970\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><ul class='ez-toc-list-level-4' ><li class='ez-toc-heading-level-4'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#TLDR\" >TL;DR<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#How_the_tracking_worked\" >How the tracking worked<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#Anthropics_response\" >Anthropic\u2019s response<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#The_distillation_backdrop\" >The distillation backdrop<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#The_developer_trust_problem\" >The developer trust problem<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-6\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-over-hidden-chinese-user-tracking\/#The_bigger_picture\" >The bigger picture<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.thenextweb.com\/2021\/04\/Jack-Ma-hed.avif\" \/><\/p>\n<div id=\"article-main-content\">\n<p><em><\/p>\n<div class=\"postContent-tldr\">\n<h4 class=\"postContent-offsetTitle\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"TLDR\"><\/span>TL;DR<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>Alibaba banned Claude Code after security researchers found Anthropic had embedded steganographic tracking code to identify Chinese users. The ban follows Anthropic\u2019s accusation that Alibaba ran the largest known distillation attack on its models.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Alibaba has banned its employees from using Claude Code, Anthropic\u2019s AI-powered coding agent, after security researchers discovered that the tool contained hidden code designed to identify Chinese users. The ban, effective 10 July, follows\u00a0weeks of escalating conflict between the two companies\u00a0over allegations that Alibaba stole Anthropic\u2019s AI capabilities through industrial-scale distillation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>As Claude Code was recently discovered to carry back-door risks, after comprehensive evaluation, Claude Code has now been added to a list of high-risk software with security vulnerabilities,<\/em>\u201d Alibaba said in an internal notice reported by the South China Morning Post. The company recommended employees use Qoder, its own coding agent platform, as a substitute.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"How_the_tracking_worked\"><\/span>How the tracking worked<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reddit<\/a> user identified as LegitMichel777 reverse-engineered Claude Code on 30 June and found obfuscated code that had been silently present since version 2.1.91, released on 2 April, with no mention in the release notes. The code checked whether a user\u2019s system timezone was set to Asia\/Shanghai or Asia\/Urumqi and scanned proxy URLs against a hardcoded list of Chinese domains and AI lab addresses.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than logging the results conventionally, the system used steganography to hide its signals in the system prompt sent back to Anthropic\u2019s servers. If the timezone was Chinese, the date format changed from dashes to slashes, and the apostrophe in \u201c<em>Today\u2019s date is<\/em>\u201d was sw<a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">app<\/a>ed with one of three visually identical but technically distinct Unicode characters depending on which flags were triggered.<\/p>\n<p>The alterations are invisible to human users and potentially even to the AI model itself, but they are machine-parseable by Anthropic\u2019s servers. Portions of the detection code were\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/cybersecuritynews.com\/anthropic-claude-hidden-code\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">XOR-obfuscated with the key 91<\/a>, a technique used to prevent plain-text extraction during code analysis.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Anthropics_response\"><\/span>Anthropic\u2019s response<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Thariq Shihipar, an Anthropic engineer on the Claude Code team, said on X that the tracking was \u201c<em>an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorised resellers and protect against distillation<\/em>.\u201d He said the team had been \u201c<em>meaning to take this down for a while<\/em>\u201d and that the pull request to remove it was merged on 1 July.<\/p>\n<p>The rollback coincided with\u00a0the restoration of Anthropic\u2019s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, which the US Commerce Department had ordered the company to disable for all foreign nationals in mid-June after Amazon researchers found a jailbreak vulnerability. The export controls were lifted on 30 June, and Anthropic restored access on 2 July, saying it would \u201cscale up government collaboration\u201d on frontier AI security.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"The_distillation_backdrop\"><\/span>The distillation backdrop<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Anthropic\u2019s justification for the tracking code sits within a broader campaign against what it calls systematic theft of its models\u2019 capabilities. In a letter to the US Senate Banking Committee on 10 June, the company accused operators affiliated with Alibaba\u2019s Qwen AI lab of running\u00a0the largest known distillation attack\u00a0on Claude, using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate 28.8 million exchanges between April and June.<\/p>\n<p>Alibaba has denied the accusation. Anthropic had previously named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax in February as perpetrators of similar campaigns, framing distillation as an existential threat to the business models of frontier AI companies.<\/p>\n<p>Distillation, the practice of using a powerful model\u2019s outputs to train a smaller one, occupies a grey area in AI development.\u00a0Asian AI startups have launched alternatives to Anthropic\u2019s models\u00a0partly because the export ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 left a gap in the market, making the line between legitimate competition and illicit extraction increasingly difficult to draw.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"The_developer_trust_problem\"><\/span>The developer trust problem<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Claude Code requires deep access to a developer\u2019s local file system to read, modify, and execute code, meaning any hidden functionality in the tool effectively has access to everything on the machine. Huorong Security, a Chinese cybersecurity firm, said Anthropic\u2019s tracking was not only a transparency issue but also raised cross-border data compliance concerns.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Today it\u2019s a timezone check, tomorrow it could be system sabotage or data exfiltration,<\/em>\u201d one Reddit user wrote. Anthropic\u2019s privacy policy states that it collects the kind of data in question, but critics argue the steganographic method, designed to be invisible to users, crosses a line that a standard privacy disclosure does not.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"The_bigger_picture\"><\/span>The bigger picture<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>The episode accelerates China\u2019s push to reduce reliance on American AI tools, which Chinese firms increasingly view as carrying legal, security, and operational risks.\u00a0Alibaba has been building out its own AI stack aggressively, integrating its Qwen models across products from e-commerce to robotics, and the Claude Code ban gives it further justification to push employees toward domestic alternatives.<\/p>\n<p>Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute\u2019s Centre for China Analysis, said the conflict showed how the US-China AI competition has moved beyond <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a> into access control and sovereignty. \u201c<em>If a US AI coding tool can detect Chinese usage or proxy access, then it\u2019s not surprising for major Chinese tech companies to not want employees using it internally,<\/em>\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic\u2019s models have long been officially inaccessible in China, but they remain popular among domestic developers who use workarounds to maintain access. Whether the tracking controversy pushes more of them toward Chinese alternatives or simply confirms what many already suspected about the risks of depending on American AI tools is a question that extends well beyond Alibaba.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMN63nwsw68G3Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" target=\"_blank\" >Technology category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/alibaba-bans-claude-code-anthropic-tracking-chinese-users\" target=\"_blank\" >Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TL;DR Alibaba banned Claude Code after security researchers found Anthropic had embedded steganographic tracking code to identify Chinese users. The ban follows Anthropic\u2019s accusation that Alibaba ran the largest known distillation attack on its models. Alibaba has banned its employees from using Claude Code, Anthropic\u2019s AI-powered coding agent, after security researchers discovered that the tool&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":736922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/media.thenextweb.com\/2021\/04\/Jack-Ma-hed.avif","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}