US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said users in China being advised to uninstall its flagship Claude Code product were not supposed to be using it in the first place, responding after Beijing warned of security “backdoor” risks.

The company’s statement comes after a cybersecurity platform managed by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on Wednesday that Anthropic’s agentic coding tool poses “a serious threat” to Chinese users, in the latest escalation of the US-China AI race.

According to a post on the WeChat account of China’s National Vulnerability Database, Claude Code’s “built-in monitoring mechanism” means that sensitive user information could be sent to a remote server without the user’s consent.

Anthropic confirmed last week that it had embedded hidden code in Claude Code to track user locations in an attempt to stop illicit “distillation” of its models.

The Chinese cybersecurity platform said that its warning applied to Claude Code versions 2.1.91 to 2.1.196, which span a period from April to late June. Anthropic has released newer versions of the product since then.

“For developers that have installed the above-mentioned affected versions, they should immediately uninstall or upgrade to the latest secure version that has removed the relevant backdoor code,” the post said, recommending users to strengthen control over external access permissions to prevent “unauthorised transmission of sensitive data”.