Anthropic is tightening how Chinese companies can access its Claude AI models, closing workarounds that rely on foreign subsidiaries, cloud platforms, and VPNs. The latest change, as reported by the Financial Times, extends earlier rules that blocked direct commercial access from China and other restricted regions and now targets ownership structures and “transfer station” services that quietly relay traffic to overseas Claude accounts.
Firms including Ant Group have accessed Claude via overseas entities, cloud providers, and other indirect routes. Ant reportedly gave staff corporate Claude accounts tied to a Singapore-based subsidiary, while ByteDance reimbursed engineers for personal Claude subscriptions bought with VPN access.
While these practices do not violate U.S. or Chinese law, they do violate Anthropic’s terms of service, which prohibit Chinese companies and foreign entities under their control from using Claude.
Some groups have also reached Claude through foreign-incorporated units that run on cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure, which makes enforcement harder.
Anthropic now plans to monitor accounts for signals like computer time zones and usage patterns to detect accounts that act as “transfer stations” for China-linked firms. A person briefed on the policy said the company wants to shut down a growing network of Singapore subsidiaries used to buy U.S. AI technology with less scrutiny.
Ownership-Based Bans and Security Concerns
Anthropic’s public policy shift on China started in 2025, when it updated its terms to block any company more than 50% owned, directly or indirectly, by entities in unsupported regions such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Anthropic said, “This update is intended to prevent workarounds,” and argued that geographic blocks alone were not enough because some organizations routed access through international subsidiaries. The company also told Tom’s Hardware the change reduces “legal, regulatory, and security risks” and keeps “authoritarian” and “adversarial” regimes from using its most advanced models.
In February 2026, CEO Dario Amodei said the company had “forgone several hundred million dollars in revenue” by cutting off Claude for firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party and stopping CCP-sponsored cyberattacks that tried to abuse the system. He also backed stronger export controls on AI chips to preserve what he called a “democratic advantage” in frontier AI capabilities.
The latest move to close loopholes around Chinese access fits into that wider stance, even though Anthropic has not fully explained how it will police cloud resellers and complex multinational corporate structures.
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