Alibaba blocked Claude Code after Anthropic’s tracking experiment angered Chinese developers and security staff.

Claude access becomes risky when it also inspects timezone, proxy, or identity signals.

Anthropic said the feature was an experiment to stop resellers and model distillation.

Alibaba’s concern was that Claude Code could identify China-linked users while running inside employee developer environments.

That made the issue larger than ordinary app tracking, because the tool worked close to private code.

Claude Code could read files, edit projects, and interact with terminals on employee machines.

Alibaba treated that access as a security risk, not just a software preference.

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scmp. com/tech/big-tech/article/3359375/alibaba-bans-staff-using-claude-code-over-anthropic-spyware-concerns