Claude Code's complicated China problem involves bans on both sides of the Pacific

Both sides in this standoff can technically claim the moral high ground, Anthropic says it was fighting distillation and account abuse, Alibaba says it found a tool quietly fingerprinting its engineers. The truth is messier and more interesting, this is what AI cold war friction actually looks like day to day, not sanctions announcements but hidden geofencing logic buried in a coding agent. Whichever side you believe, the bigger story is that no major AI tool can pretend to be geopolitically neutral anymore.