Alibaba Reportedly Bans Claude Over Allegations of AI Model Data Extraction

(Central News Agency, reporter Zhang Qian, Hong Kong, July 3) According to reports, Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba has internally requested the uninstallation of products related to the American artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic and banned its AI model Claude.

"Zhi Dong Xi," a mainland media platform that focuses on the development of technology industries such as AI, reported this news today.

The report stated that due to the risk of backdoor implantation, Alibaba internally requested the uninstallation of Anthropic-related products, including multiple model series such as Sonnet, Opus, and Fable, as well as Agent products including Claude Code. The ban will take effect on the 10th.

The report quoted an insider from Alibaba as revealing that the reason behind this is that Claude Code was recently exposed for having security risks of backdoor implantation. After comprehensive evaluation, Alibaba has listed it as a high-risk software.

The report quoted another source as saying that since the beginning of this year, Alibaba has not only launched free internal model quotas to encourage employees to adopt AI technology but also implemented a large reimbursement policy for the use of external models. Employees can freely choose external models such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini. Many programmers consume hundreds of dollars in quotas weekly and use Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Alibaba's Qoder as frequently used Agent tools.

Alibaba's ban on Claude "cuts off this channel."

The report stated that the direct trigger for this ban can be traced back to June 24. At that time, there were reports that Anthropic submitted a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on June 10, accusing Alibaba of using approximately 25,000 fake accounts to engage in over 28 million conversations with Claude between April 22 and June 5.

This behavior was unilaterally characterized as an "industrial-grade model distillation attack," and the incident escalated to the level of U.S. national security.

The report stated that from late June to early July, Anthropic implemented a new round of large-scale account bans on Claude, with a large number of Chinese users being banned without warning, affecting both personal subscriptions and team accounts.

Alibaba's stock closed at HK$94.1 today in Hong Kong, down HK$0.4 or 0.423%, showing weaker performance among similar stocks. (Editor: Feng Zhao) 1150703

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