Posted by Alumni from TechCrunch
July 5, 2026
Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies, as well as foreign entities owned by those companies, from using its models. The company has reportedly been working to close loopholes that allow Chinese users to access Claude. According to a recent Reddit post, some of that loophole-closing involved a version of Claude Code that could secretly identify Chinese users. Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar said in a post on X that this was 'an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.' (Distillation is a practice where AI models are trained on the outputs of other models.) Last chance to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit. Join 1,000+ founders and VCs at all stages for real-world scaling insights and connections that move the needle.Savings end June 26, 11:59 p.m. PT. learn more