Alibaba has banned its employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work, citing concerns over alleged backdoor risks. The company is requiring employees to switch to its own coding platform, Qoder. The ban follows a recent accusation by Anthropic that Alibaba had distilled its model, and the discovery of code in Claude Code that checks if the user is from China. Despite Anthropic's access restrictions for Chinese users, Claude Code had remained popular among Chinese programmers.
Anthropic will release a patch on Wednesday to remove covert code added to Claude Code months ago. The code was designed to prevent model distillation and unauthorized reseller abuse by checking if the API base URL environment variable was overridden, then inspecting the system timezone and hostname against a list that included known Chinese AI labs, other AI companies, resellers, and gateway domains. Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar stated the feature was a March experiment and that the team has since adopted more effective mitigations, having long planned to remove the code. A developer had previously discovered the hidden checks and publicized them.
Anthropic announced on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on the Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The company will resume providing access to these advanced AI models on Wednesday. The restrictions were originally imposed in mid-June on national security grounds, blocking access for all foreign nationals, including Anthropic's own foreign employees. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated in a social media post that the administration worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5, aligning with U.S. interests and AI leadership.
An analysis of the Claude Code binary (v2.1.196) revealed that it covertly checks whether the system timezone is Asia/Shanghai or Asia/Urumqi and matches against a list of Chinese tech company domains, including baidu.com, alibaba-inc.com, alipay.com, bytedance.net, and others. This behavior is suspected to be a countermeasure against Chinese AI companies distilling Anthropic's Claude model through the coding tool. The finding was reported on the security research blog thereallo.dev.
The U.S. government, through Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, has authorized Anthropic to re-release its new model Mythos 5, but only to a limited group. Access will be granted to approximately 100 institutions, including government agencies and private companies. This decision follows a similar phased-release requirement imposed on OpenAI for its GPT-5.6 model, indicating a coordinated regulatory approach to advanced AI systems.