Leading financial institutions — investment bank Goldman Sachs and crypto exchange OKX — have imposed a ban on the use of Anthropic's AI model Claude for their employees in Hong Kong. The restrictions were introduced a few months apart, but the reasons turned out to be identical: regional access rules set by the developer itself.
Anthropic does not provide access to Claude in Hong Kong and mainland China. This creates serious inconveniences for global companies whose employees work in these regions or are temporarily there on business trips.
OKX: Temporary Block and Shift to Alternatives
OKX faced the problem after a brief block of its corporate account at Anthropic. After restoring access, the exchange decided to redirect requests from employees in Hong Kong to other language models. Notably, the company does not plan to help workers bypass restrictions via VPN during trips across the region.
The situation looks especially telling against the backdrop of OKX's active AI adoption. The exchange encourages daily use of artificial intelligence and takes this factor into account when evaluating employee performance. According to CEO Star Xu, the company spends between $6 and $8 million monthly on major LLM providers.
Goldman Sachs: Contractual Restrictions
Goldman Sachs closed access to Claude for employees in Hong Kong as early as early 2026. The bank discovered that its agreement with Anthropic does not extend to this region. The restriction also affected foreign workers traveling to Hong Kong — mainly software engineers.
Unlike OKX, the reason for the ban at Goldman Sachs lies in the terms of the contract, not a temporary account block. At the same time, the bank is not abandoning cooperation with Anthropic: Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti has been working with the company's engineers for several months to create AI solutions for trade accounting and client verification.
Hong Kong authorities actively support the adoption of artificial intelligence in finance, but restrictions imposed by developers themselves, including Anthropic, hinder this. Both companies faced the same geographic barriers, pointing to a global trend.
Washington and Beijing are actively competing for leadership in AI. Chinese artificial intelligence models are increasingly catching up with American ones.
Because of this rivalry, US companies are actively deciding who and where can use their technologies. Neither company has clarified whether these restrictions apply to clients and partners from mainland China. The question is especially important ahead of the September US-China talks on AI.
My analysis: This situation is a vivid example of how geopolitical factors directly affect the operational activities of crypto exchanges and traditional financial giants. For OKX, which is actively expanding in Asia, dependence on American AI providers is becoming a strategic risk. In the long term, this could accelerate the crypto industry's shift to alternative, including Chinese, language models — which would change the balance of power in the market for AI solutions in the financial sector.