Alibaba blocks Claude Code: escalation of the tech war between the US and China
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has imposed a corporate ban on the use of the Claude Code tool from American company Anthropic. This decision is a direct response to the user tracking mechanisms identified in the AI assistant for developers.
The ban, implemented by Alibaba's management, requires all employees to switch to using its own programming platform, Qoder. Notably, this directive came just days after independent developers discovered features in Claude Code capable of identifying users associated with China.
Claude Code checks the system environment, including time zone and proxy data, after which it inserts hidden markers into requests sent to Anthropic's servers. According to a representative from Anthropic, this feature was launched in March as an "experiment" to protect against unlicensed resellers and attempts to distill the model.
Conflict Escalates
This incident is just the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged confrontation. Previously, Anthropic accused Alibaba of illegal "distillation"—a method where a less powerful model is trained on the responses of a stronger one. According to Anthropic, the Chinese company was thus attempting to accelerate access to the advanced capabilities of the Mythos Preview model. The accusations were detailed in a letter sent to two U.S. senators; Alibaba has not publicly commented on them.
In parallel, Anthropic is tightening restrictions for Chinese users, closing loopholes through which they accessed Claude. Chinese companies actively used VPNs, cloud platforms, and proxies—so-called "relay stations"—masking traffic as American. However, as insiders note, corporations are increasingly aware of the legal and compliance risks of such workarounds.
Trend Toward Import Substitution
Against the backdrop of American developers' attempts to prevent unauthorized access, Chinese cloud and AI companies are accelerating their transition to domestic and open-source models—such as DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Moonshot, and Zhipu. Paradoxically, at the same time, Chinese AI models are penetrating the U.S. market, causing concern among some industry experts.
My analysis: We are witnessing a classic escalation in the spirit of the Cold War, but now in the field of artificial intelligence. Alibaba's ban is not just a corporate decision but a signal that the technological race between the U.S. and China is entering a phase of open confrontation. In the short term, this will accelerate the development of proprietary AI ecosystems in both countries, but in the long term, it will create serious risks for global technological integration and knowledge exchange.