Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

Remember how Kim Dotcom got destroyed for criminal copyright infringement? One would think the big tech CEOs would face the same fate, that police officers would rappel down helicopters, storm their mansions and bring them out in cuffs.

Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.

There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.

It is worth thinking about the fact the total throughput of even a big LLM provider isn't many megabits.

If a token compresses to around a byte, worldwide AI input and output is around 1 gigabyte per second.

For any intelligence agency, they can afford to keep and store all of that forever, and later do analysis on it.

Leakage of IP and training on your data is something what I am pointing out too, but people will turn around and try to smooth me down that TOS does not allow that if you are an enterprise client. Are you really going to believe that AI companies won't ignore TOS, when they were ignoring literal laws which sent others to jail in the past? Especially when more data = better model?

It seemed pretty mild compared to what's collected by modern websites and apps, though? How many don't know your Timezone?

Wait what do you mean "if"?

And I'm the king of France

Exaggerate much? If you think POTUS would lose sleep about a date format timezone marker, I don't know what to tell you.

Maybe if they didn’t farm all the data from Claude to train their own trash models. Anthropic wouldn’t feel the need to do it.

It's insane that it's becoming a concern now. It should've ended the discussion from the very beginning.

not to mention they are kind of capable of executing code and susceptible to injections which also amounts to being practically backdoors if youre not super careful about how u use the tooling

Wasn't one of the big promises the AI labs made "uncopyrighting"? Ie. the ability to reconstruct large works, including source code, without actual access to the source code? Everything from movies to operating systems.

Becoming? We've moved entirely in the opposite direction.

When these tools first appeared the overwhelming conversation was about the risk of letting a remote tool siphon your code and intellectual property (where eventually they're going to add that to their training). Now everyone is using them, and that fear seems to have dissolved. Every corporation is sprinkled with Claude Code, Antigravity, Copilot, Codex, and so on. Even the long fear-mongered Chinese providers are being heavily used in many spaces.

In this case this is a PR battle between two firms, and it isn't much more. And Alibaba isn't worried about the "proprietary code" (the truth is that there is incredibly little interest in most orgs code), but that the tool is a backdoor, or at least that is the claim.

[citation needed]

There was a big thread about it here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

That’s not what a backdoor is…

Alibaba has engineers in Hongkong, Singapore, North America. It’s a global corporation

Same way every ban is evaded, smurfing

There is a reason Singapore tops the rank on Claude usage

Does Alibaba only have developers in the China?

The same way they buy "banned" and "sanctioned" NVIDIA GPUs.

Cc can be used with non Anthropic models.

> how can they still use claude?

Workarounds aside, it says Claude Code not Claude.

i.e. they are using the CLI running any model. You can for instance run GLM with it.

I think we should start calling it "distillation terrorism" just to make it sound even more absurd.

> Translation: Alibaba will continue distillation attacks using accounts that aren't directly attributable to it's own corporate infrastructure.

What's a "distillation attack"? How is it different from simply distillation?

(Mis)anthropic already performed "distillation attacks" on the internet.

i can see why they want to stop it but 1. you have to pay for the "attack" 2. these AI companies trained on copyrighted content without permission or attribution to anyone who's data was used to train.

As long as they're paying for the tokens, there's no attack . Otherwise you have to call training on copyrighted material theft.

How exactly the word attack fits in that phrase?

Did Anthropic perform "distillation attacks" when they hoovered up the entire internet?

I don't think China would strugle to scrape the internet for fresh data.

And they constantly publish state of the art LLM research (see DS4 context compaction and cache tech).

They have very capable tech giants. So while not being able to distill western models would probably have some impact, it's probably becoming lesser as time passes.

We might even see Western LLMs distilling Chinese models soon. If they aren't already to some extent.

China has most probably already achieved "escape velocity" on the software side. Now if they achieve parity, to some degree at least, on the hardware side with Nvidia it is very possible they'll overtake the US.

Of course, it is like any other kind of weapon system, eventually the knowledge gets acquired.

Yes, 100%. GLM 5.2 is capable of RSI. It's too late to stop.

Probably yes.

More than a year ago, when Anthropic and OpenAI started to gide the reasoning bits from the output, a lot of people here on HN predicted that Chinese models days were numbered.

Fast forward to today, and models such as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent. I haven't used GLM or Qwen but heard very good things about them as well.

This "massive distillation" sounds a lot like anxiety about how companies from outside the US can develop very good models themselves.