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The AI BitNº 30
The Missed Bit
Sunday · 12 July 2026
Governance
Alibaba bans Claude Code as Beijing warns of a “backdoor”
Alibaba added Anthropic's Claude Code to a “high-risk software” list on 10 July 2026 and barred employees from using it, telling them to switch to its own coding tool, Qoder. Two days earlier, a platform run by China's industry ministry warned that Claude Code carries a “backdoor” flaw.
Anthropic rejects the framing, saying the code was part of an earlier experiment to guard against model distillation, not a working backdoor.
Why it matters
Geopolitics now reaches the AI coding agents developers lean on every day.
Source: cnbc.com
The Shortlist
1
Robotics
Robots that learn by playing video games
General Intuition raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation for a foundation model that plays long video games, then pilots four-legged robots zero-shot from the front camera alone — needing only about eight minutes of real robot data to fine-tune.
Source: techcrunch.com
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