Alibaba Group NYSE:BABA has reportedly instructed employees to stop using Anthropic's Claude Code for work, escalating tensions between the 2 AI rivals as competition in China's software market intensifies.
Reuters reported that Alibaba made the move after Claude Code came under scrutiny for features that could help identify users linked to China. Employees have instead been directed to use Alibaba's own coding platform, Qoder, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The decision follows accusations by Anthropic last month that Alibaba attempted to extract capabilities from its AI models through distillation, a technique in which outputs from a more advanced model are used to train another system. Claude Code has gained popularity among Chinese developers despite Anthropic restricting access in China.
Developers recently said Claude Code examined user environment details, including timezone and proxy information, and embedded markers in prompts sent to Anthropic's servers. An Anthropic employee said on X that the feature was introduced in March as an experiment aimed at preventing account abuse and protecting against model distillation.