China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology warned that Anthropic's Claude Code contains a hidden monitoring mechanism sending user data to remote servers. Anthropic confirmed the code exists but said the affected users in China were never authorized to use Claude Code in the first place. China's National Vulnerability Database, run by the ministry, told developers on Wednesday to remove Claude Code, calling its built-in monitoring mechanism a serious threat. The affected versions run from 2.1.91 to 2.1.196, covering roughly April through late June. Anthropic said the code was part of an internal experiment introduced in March to catch resellers and stop illicit distillation. Anthropic restricts Claude Code sales in China under U.S. export rules. Alibaba has told employees to stop using Claude Code and pointed them to Qoder, its own coding assistant, according to reporting from The Register.