Alibaba bans Anthropic AI tools for employees after distillation concerns

Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic's artificial intelligence tools for work purposes as of July 10, citing concerns that the U.S. company has back-door security risks, CNBC confirmed on Monday. The ban starts Friday. The action is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities. Chinese tech giant Alibaba has banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work after the tool drew scrutiny for features that can help identify China-linked users according to a person familiar with the order. The person said that Alibaba employees were being told to use the company's own coding platform Qoder. Anthropic said last month that it had suffered a strike by Alibaba which it described as a distillation effort that involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.