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Hong Kong users are finding themselves caught off guard as the AI company Anthropic appears to be tightening restrictions on accessing its Claude models through virtual private networks (VPNs). Local residents have been reporting sudden account suspensions following the use of VPNs to connect to the service. Social media platforms X and Reddit have been flooded with complaints from those who have been using VPNs to operate Claude accounts for months, only to have them suddenly disabled.

One Hong Kong user shared their experience on the "r/claude" subreddit, stating that they received an email from Anthropic's safeguards team citing "suspicious signals" linked to their account, leading to its revocation due to policy violations. The user had relied on NordVPN from Hong Kong for six months before encountering this issue and was struggling to retrieve their conversation history and data.

While Anthropic has not made a public announcement regarding new VPN policies, the sudden increase in suspensions implies a deliberate adjustment to existing regional limitations.

Notably, Hong Kong is not included in Anthropic's list of supported locations, along with mainland China and Macau. Tech-savvy Hong Kong residents, however, had found ways to circumvent these blocks by utilizing supported markets such as Singapore via VPNs and sometimes using foreign payment information. Anthropic has yet to respond to requests for comment on this matter. This intensification of enforcement comes amid mounting conflict between Anthropic and Chinese developers.

Recently, Anthropic accused seven Chinese AI labs of engaging in "industrial-scale" model distillation, a process of harvesting outputs from Claude to train competing models. The accusation targeted companies like Beijing-based Moonshot AI and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, both of which allegedly bypassed geographic restrictions by creating thousands of fraudulent accounts and employing third-party proxy networks.

Moonshot AI, alone, was said to have routed over 23 million exchanges to Claude between May and July, with accounts appearing to originate from Singapore and Japan.

Beijing has dismissed US allegations of AI distillation as unfounded. The geopolitical tension surrounding AI development has been escalating. In a recent essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that a Chinese lead in AI could pose a "grave danger" to the world, urging Washington to maintain export controls on advanced semiconductors to China.