Apple in Talks to Buy Memory Chips From China's CXMT and YMTC as AI Squeezes Supply•Cambricon Hits $147 Billion, Targets 500,000 AI Chips as China Races to Replace Nvidia•ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to Shut Down AI Agent Features on July 15•140 Trillion Tokens a Day: Inside China's Bid to Redefine AI Leadership•China's Memory Makers Come for Samsung and SK Hynix — With Capital, Talent and State Backing•GLM-5.2 and the 'Mini DeepSeek Moment': How Close Is China, Really?•Baseten Raises $1.5 Billion Series F at $13 Billion Valuation as Inference Demand Explodes•DeepSeek Raises $7.4 Billion at $50 Billion Valuation in First-Ever External Round•Apple in Talks to Buy Memory Chips From China's CXMT and YMTC as AI Squeezes Supply•Cambricon Hits $147 Billion, Targets 500,000 AI Chips as China Races to Replace Nvidia•ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to Shut Down AI Agent Features on July 15•140 Trillion Tokens a Day: Inside China's Bid to Redefine AI Leadership•China's Memory Makers Come for Samsung and SK Hynix — With Capital, Talent and State Backing•GLM-5.2 and the 'Mini DeepSeek Moment': How Close Is China, Really?•Baseten Raises $1.5 Billion Series F at $13 Billion Valuation as Inference Demand Explodes•DeepSeek Raises $7.4 Billion at $50 Billion Valuation in First-Ever External Round•Apple in Talks to Buy Memory Chips From China's CXMT and YMTC as AI Squeezes Supply•Cambricon Hits $147 Billion, Targets 500,000 AI Chips as China Races to Replace Nvidia•ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to Shut Down AI Agent Features on July 15•140 Trillion Tokens a Day: Inside China's Bid to Redefine AI Leadership•China's Memory Makers Come for Samsung and SK Hynix — With Capital, Talent and State Backing•GLM-5.2 and the 'Mini DeepSeek Moment': How Close Is China, Really?•Baseten Raises $1.5 Billion Series F at $13 Billion Valuation as Inference Demand Explodes•DeepSeek Raises $7.4 Billion at $50 Billion Valuation in First-Ever External Round•
Lanceum
Alibaba, which banned Claude Code internally after the tracking code discovery
TNW
Brief

Anthropic Pulls Hidden China-Tracking Code From Claude Code After Backlash — Alibaba Bans the Tool Anyway

A Reddit user found XOR-obfuscated code checking timezones against Shanghai and a list of 147 Chinese entities. Anthropic called it an anti-abuse experiment; Alibaba called it spyware.

R
Rina ChandraTech Reporter
3 min read

Anthropic has removed covert tracking code from Claude Code after a Reddit user discovered the tool was silently flagging China-linked usage — an episode that prompted Alibaba to ban Claude Code internally and handed Beijing's tech press a ready-made privacy scandal.

What the Code Did

The discovered mechanism checked system timezones against "Asia/Shanghai" and "Asia/Urumqi" and scanned proxy URLs against a hardcoded list of 147 Chinese entities including Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and Ant Group. On a positive match, the output watermarked itself: date formats switched from hyphens to slashes, and apostrophes were swapped for visually identical Unicode variants encoding which flags had triggered. The entity lists were concealed with XOR encryption and base64 encoding — invisible to plain-text inspection.

The Response

Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar acknowledged the mechanism as "an experiment we launched in March" intended to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation. The removal shipped in the July 1 release. Critics noted the feature never appeared in release notes or terms of service, and that the obfuscation suggested it was built not to be found.

Why It Matters

The timing is combustible: the discovery landed alongside FT reporting on Anthropic's crackdown on Chinese firms accessing Claude through Singapore subsidiaries and VPNs. Anthropic is simultaneously obligated to enforce US restrictions and now accused of covert surveillance while doing so. Alibaba's ban makes the practical point — every discovery of this kind accelerates exactly what US policy fears: China's biggest engineering organizations migrating, permanently, to domestic models.

Newsletter

Get Lanceum in your inbox

Weekly insights on AI and technology in Asia.

Share

More in Brief

AI for Good Global Summit 2026 in Geneva
Brief

Geneva Becomes the World's AI Capital as 'AI for Good' Summit Opens July 7

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code model
Brief

Kimi K2.7 Code Becomes First Beijing Model Available Inside GitHub Copilot

SoftBank headquarters
Brief

SoftBank Revives $10 Billion OpenAI-Backed Loan With a Sweetener for Lenders

Lanceum

Independent coverage of AI and technology across Asia. We go beyond headlines to explain what matters.

Sections

Company

Colophon

Typeset in Space Grotesk & DM Serif Display. Built with Nuxt & Tailwind. Powered by curiosity.

© 2026 Lanceum. All rights reserved.

Independent • Rigorous • Asia-Focused