Without warning, Anthropic began mass blocking the accounts of Claude users who used chatbots through VPNs—as evidenced by a wave of complaints from Hong Kong users on Reddit and X. According to sources in the South China Morning Post, this is due to the US artificial intelligence company tightening controls on its Claude model’s compliance with geographical restrictions. The wave of blocking is likely to reach Russian users.
Image source: Human
A Hong Kong user posted on the r/claude subreddit that he received an email from Anthropic security stating that his account was revoked for a terms of service violation due to “suspicious signals” associated with it. “I have been using NordVPN in Hong Kong for six months and this happened today,” – said the user, adding that he was trying to recover communication history and data.
Anthropic has yet to officially announce a new VPN policy, but the massive blockade signals a tightening of long-standing regional restrictions, and the company’s services are not officially supported in Hong Kong, China, and Macau.
Anthropic has tightened compliance measures amid growing tensions with Chinese developers. Last month, Anthropic accused seven Chinese artificial intelligence labs of conducting “industrial” model distillation, which collects responses from Cloud systems to train their models.
Meanwhile, companies such as Moonshot AI (Beijing) and DeepSeek (Hangzhou) circumvent geo-restrictions by using thousands of fictitious accounts and third-party proxy networks. Between May and July, Moonshot alone made more than 23 million requests to Claude, disguised as requests from users in Singapore and Japan. Beijing, in turn, denies U.S. accusations of refining artificial intelligence models, calling them baseless.
As Anthropic tightens its approach to complying with geo-restrictions on the use of Claude models, there are concerns that this could also affect users from Russia, which is also not on the list of countries officially supported by Anthropic’s service.
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