Anthropic has intensified efforts to prevent unauthorised access to its artificial intelligence services from China after identifying methods allegedly used by Chinese companies to circumvent its restrictions, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper said firms including Ant Financial have gained access to Anthropic’s Claude AI tools through overseas subsidiaries, cloud service providers and other workarounds.
The report said Ant provided employees with corporate Claude accounts linked to its Singapore-based entity, while ByteDance reimbursed engineers for personal Claude subscriptions that they accessed using virtual private networks (VPNs).
According to the Financial Times, the reported practices do not breach either US or Chinese law. However, they are said to violate Anthropic’s terms of service, which prohibit Chinese companies and foreign entities under their control from using the company’s AI models.
In response, Anthropic has reportedly strengthened its enforcement measures by monitoring accounts for indicators such as users’ computer time zones and targeting so-called “transfer station” services that relay requests through overseas Claude accounts.
The newspaper added that some companies have also accessed Claude through foreign subsidiaries using cloud infrastructure, including Microsoft’s Azure platform.
Neither Anthropic nor the companies named in the report had publicly commented on the allegations at the time the Financial Times article was published.
