 "Trump effect? In a first policy shift, American firm Anthropic to stop selling AI services to China-controlled companies")
In a major policy shift, American-based AI company, Anthropic, has announced that it will stop selling its products to Chinese-owned companies and groups, as the trade war between the US and China grows.
The maker of Claude AI is trying to limit China's ability to use its technology to bolster the country’s military capabilities and technology, an Anthropic executive told the Financial Times.
“We are taking action to close a loophole that allows Chinese companies to access frontier AI,” the official said, adding that the directives will also apply to other US adversaries like Russia, Iran and North Korea.
What will be affected?
From ByteDance and Tencent to Alibaba, the policy will affect a number of Chinese tech companies and will be effective immediately.
Direct customers, as well as those accessing Anthropic’s services through cloud platforms, will also be impacted. According to the executive, the effect on Anthropic’s global revenue is expected to be in the “low hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The executive added that while the company is ready to lose some business to its rivals, Anthropic felt it necessary to move ahead with the policy to highlight that the issue was a “significant problem”.
AI: China vs US
Washington is increasingly concerned about China’s expansion of artificial intelligence technology and its use in Beijing’s military.
Chinese start-up DeepSeek made waves in the AI industry earlier this year with the release of its open-source R1 model, regarded as comparable to top U.S. models. OpenAI later alleged that DeepSeek had improperly accessed its models to train R1. DeepSeek has not responded to the allegations.
China is readying itself to join the AI race. Earlier this year, Tech giant Alibaba Group joined the AI race after launching its artificial intelligence model Qwen 3, an upgraded version of its flagship model that is equipped with new hybrid reasoning capabilities.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe Qwen3 series features two mixture-of-experts (MoE) models designed to compete with hybrid reasoning systems, recently launched by Anthropic and Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet.
The Biden administration has imposed broad export controls aimed at restricting China’s access to American AI technologies. In contrast, the Trump administration has introduced virtually no new controls so far, as President Donald Trump seeks to secure a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
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