How People in China Continue to Transcend Anthropic’s Geolocation Restrictions

Anthropic goes to goes a long way to preventing people in China from using its AI models, but in practice, its defenses often fail. Over the past year, inventors, researchers, and technology enthusiasts across the country have developed innovative ways to access Claude. Many of them consider themselves to be the world’s biggest proponents of AI, striving to make a profit.

In early June, Anthropic publicly released Fable 5, a secure version of its most powerful AI to date, Mythos. Chinese social media immediately lit up with posts from people sharing what they saw after trying it. (Anthropic opportunity to be thwarted for example around the world a few days later in response to export controls imposed by the Trump administration).

Chinese people can often use other Western AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using private networks, foreign phone numbers, and international payment methods to create and manage their accounts. But Anthropic has apparently taken aggressive actions, such as blocking accounts it suspects are owned and controlled by people based in China. On Chinese television, users often report being suspended from Claude without warning, even after doing so.

A game of cat and mouse will stimulate the underground economy so that Claude can travel to China. Accounts are sold on Chinese ecommerce platforms such as Taobao and in illegal marketplaces on Telegram. Recently, small “transfer station” companies have also emerged. These services act as an intermediary, buying access to Anthropic’s API outside of China and redistributing Claude API tokens to users in the country. The implementation is designed to provide developers and other users with a stable and reliable AI assistant.

Michael Aciman, a spokesman for Anthropic, says the company uses a number of methods to detect changes, including identity verification, to enforce its policies to prevent unauthorized access to Claude. He said Anthropic also worked to identify and disrupt projects used to access chatbots in China.

Despite all the difficulties that the Chinese people are forced to overcome in order to use Claude, there are still many loyal fans of Anthropic in the country. It is very popular among programmers. Although Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Z.ai have some versions of the big open languages ​​on the market, third-party tests still show that they lag behind closed versions like Claude. During a recent trip to China, WIRED spoke with academics and engineers from several tech companies who said they prefer using Claude over Chinese brands to code, and are eager to try out any new version Anthropic releases.

Zilan Qian, a research fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab, observed black market by reselling Western AI tokens to Chinese users. He noted that Chinese developers are said to be more inclined to use tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex compared to tools from domestic companies. “Analysis shows that Chinese models are still six to nine months behind US models, and in some aspects such as labeling and production, you can tell the difference,” says Qian.

“For both Chinese AI policymakers and technical people, they have less difficulty using American ideas or products, regardless of national competition or ideas,” said Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which researches AI and China policy. He said: “Americans are the ones who think that something is dirty because it comes from their enemy.”

Dario Amodei, founder and CEO of Anthropic, often clearly presents China’s access to border nations as a major threat to US national security. This week, Anthropic criticized Alibaba using Claude’s output to educate the Chinese company’s competitors, a method called “distillation.” Anthropic he said again other Chinese companies have done the same in the past. For these and other national security reasons, Anthropic does not offer commercial opportunities to Claude in China, or to assistants of Chinese companies located outside the country.