Anthropic’s Claude restrictions put overseas AI tools backed by China in limbo

An abrupt decision by American artificial intelligence firm Anthropic to restrict service to Chinese-owned entities anywhere in the world has cast uncertainty over some Claude-dependent overseas tools backed by China’s tech giants.

After Anthropic’s notice on Friday that it would upgrade access restrictions to entities “more than 50 per cent owned … by companies headquartered in unsupported regions” such as China, regardless of where they are, Chinese users have fretted over whether they could still access the San Francisco-based firm’s industry-leading AI models.

While it remains unknown how many entities could be affected and how the restrictions would be implemented, anxiety has started to spread among some users.

Singapore-based Trae, an AI-powered code editor launched by Chinese tech giant ByteDance for overseas users, is a known user of OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude models. A number of users of Trae have raised the issue of refunds to Trae staff on developer platforms over concerns that their access to Claude would no longer be available.

A Trae manager responded by saying that Claude was still available, urging users not to consider refunds “for the time being”. The company had just announced a premium “Max Mode” on September 2, which boasted access to significantly more powerful coding abilities “fully supported” by Anthropic’s Claude models.

Other Chinese tech giants offer Claude on their coding agents marketed to international users, including Alibaba Group Holding’s Qoder and Tencent Holdings’ CodeBuddy, which is still being beta tested. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.