ChinAI #367: Claude Code's Future in China?

Greetings from a world where…

North American league of legends is not closing the gap

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What is the future of Claude Code in China?

When scanning for Around the Horn articles a few weeks back, one story dominated the Chinese tech media landscape:

In the April 2026 release of Claude Code, Anthropic quietly added some code aimed at identifying Chinese users. After people figured out what was happening, Anthropic framed the move as an effort to guard against distillation and announced a rollback. In the wake of this revelation, Alibaba has issued an internal mandate to remove all Claude software from employee computers.

Additionally, on July 8, China’s National Vulnerability Database warned about a security backdoor risk in Claude Code. In this week’s issue, I wanted to get deeper into this story and try to understand the future of Claude Code in China.

To start, however, we need to understand the past and present of Claude Code in China. Afra Wang, who writes the excellent Concurrent newsletter, provided a temperature check in January 2026 when she visited Shanghai:

I’ve been deep in the tech scene across hangzhou, liangzhu, and shanghai, meeting a few dozens of devs who are working on ai. a big revelation is…so far, probably due to some confirmation bias, not a single one is using Chinese coding tools. they’re all on Claude Code/Antigravity/Codex/Cursor.

Of these tools, Claude was the most frequently mentioned model.

Okay, so six months later, now, there’s this firestorm over a tracker that secretly monitors Claude Code users in China. By the way, the ClaudeAI subreddit consensus sees this as a “reasonable, if sneaky, way for Anthropic to combat the rampant unauthorized resale…