While in the US, the government's periodic bans of the latest model from Anthropic (which has made AI doomerism - in hopes of getting the government to regulate everyone else expect Anthropic, yet repeatedly achieving just the opposite - into an art form) has been all the rage in recent months, in China it is the other way around, with China's tech giant Alibaba banning employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code at work after the tool drew scrutiny for features that can help identify China-linked users, Reuters reported.
The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities - a dispute that highlights the frantic race between the U.S. and China to take the lead in artificial intelligence.
Claude Code is Anthropic's AI coding assistant for software developers, and has become popular among programmers in China despite Anthropic's restrictions on access by users and entities in China.
To avoid further escalation of the distillation scandal, Reuters says that Alibaba employees were being told to use the company's own coding platform Qoder.
As we reported at the time, in late June Anthropic said that it had suffered a strike by Alibaba, which it described as a "distillation" effort that involves
