ALIBABA BANS CLAUDE CODE TODAY, ACCUSES ANTHROPIC OF HIDING SURVEILLANCE CODE INSIDE THE APP China’s Alibaba followed through today. Starting July 10, 2026, every Alibaba employee is banned from using Anthropic’s Claude Code, the AI coding assistant that has quietly become the standard tool for software developers at companies worldwide. The internal order came with a directive to switch immediately to Qoder, Alibaba’s own coding platform. The reason given is not simply politics. Security researchers at Alibaba say they discovered hidden code inside Claude Code designed to identify users who were in China. The software reportedly examined timezone settings, proxy configurations, and other environment variables to tag users by geography, then quietly embedded identifying markers in the data sent back to Anthropic’s servers. Those findings were shared publicly on GitHub before Alibaba issued the company-wide ban. Anthropic has not confirmed or denied the existence of tracking behavior in Claude Code, though its terms of service already explicitly prohibit Chinese companies and entities with Chinese ties from using its models. That existing ban had driven many Chinese developers to use Claude Code through unofficial workarounds. The ban follows Anthropic accusing Alibaba last month of running 28.8 million unauthorized API exchanges through approximately 25,000 fake accounts over six weeks in what it described as the largest model distillation attack it had ever documented. Alibaba denied the accusation. The two companies are now effectively at war, and every developer building software in China is caught in the middle. Keywords: Alibaba Claude Code ban, Anthropic China surveillance, AI distillation attack, US China AI war