Goldman Sachs has stopped its Hong Kong bankers from using Anthropic’s Claude AI models — the latest sign of how the technology is colliding with US-China tensions. Employees in the territory have been unable to access Claude either directly or through Goldman’s in-house AI platform for the past few weeks, according to four sources familiar with the decision.
Western models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are banned in mainland China by the so-called Great Firewall, but Hong Kong has historically operated outside that perimeter, with usage limits set by the AI companies themselves. One person familiar with the move said Goldman had taken a strict reading of its contract with Anthropic following a consultation with the start-up, concluding that no Goldman employee in Hong Kong should access any Anthropic product. The restriction does not extend to other vendors such as OpenAI. Anthropic told the FT its Claude models had never been officially “supported” in Hong Kong but declined to elaborate. Goldman declined to comment.
The crackdown reflects rising fear of “distillation” — Chinese actors training new models on intensive use of foreign ones. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of doing so last year, and the White House this month accused China of “industrial-scale” theft of US AI labs’ IP — claims Beijing called “pure slander”. The move comes as Anthropic’s new Mythos model raises concern over its potential to crack current cyber defences and threaten financial-system security. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Arjun Neil Alim, Zijing Wu and Tim Bradshaw.