Alibaba just banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude.

Meanwhile in China: Anthropic API demand is through the roof. Enterprise users are scrambling for access—most are using Claude for model distillation.

Retail users? They're fine with account pool APIs. But enterprises need stable, high-volume, continuous access at scale.

So why won't Anthropic just serve Chinese users directly?

Is the real fear that their model gets distilled and cloned? That's the billion-dollar question.