News · curated 8 Jul 2026

China Says It Has Found Security Vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s Claude Code - WSJ

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8 Jul 2026wsj.comcnbc.comtheregister.com

Why it matters

Claude Code is a widely used AI coding agent, and competing state and corporate claims of backdoors, spyware, and model-extraction attacks turn the AI coding-assistant supply chain into a geopolitical security battleground that defenders must weigh when adopting these tools.

China's national vulnerability database (CNVD) claims to have found security vulnerabilities in Anthropic's Claude Code AI coding assistant, and reporting notes Alibaba banned staff from using Claude Code over 'spyware' concerns. The dispute follows Anthropic's accusation that Alibaba and other Chinese labs illicitly extracted Claude's capabilities via large-scale 'distillation' campaigns involving tens of millions of exchanges through fraudulent accounts.