OKX bars Hong Kong staff from using Anthropic's Claude AI

Crypto exchange OKX has restricted access to Anthropic's Claude AI model for employees based in Hong Kong or traveling through China after its corporate account was briefly suspended, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

OKX stopped providing Claude access to staff in the region in early August following the suspension. The account has since been restored.

"We recently became aware that access to Claude by certain OKX employees based in Hong Kong may not have been fully aligned with Anthropic's geographic access policies," OKX said in a statement.

The company said it will restrict Claude access for Hong Kong employees where required and redirect their AI requests to other models.

Anthropic does not permit access to Claude in Hong Kong or mainland China under its geographic policies.

Internal messages reviewed by Bloomberg also told employees traveling through Hong Kong or China that OKX would not support attempts to access Claude using virtual private networks. Staff were reminded this week that Claude can only be used from supported regions.

The restrictions come despite OKX making AI proficiency part of employee performance evaluations and encouraging workers to integrate AI tools into their daily workflows.

The exchange spends between $6 million and $8 million per month across several major large language model providers, according to the company.

Employees have access to both Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, although Claude is viewed internally as having a greater impact on productivity, Bloomberg previously reported.

OKX is not alone in facing Anthropic's geographic restrictions. Goldman Sachs previously cut access to Claude for employees based in Hong Kong to comply with the same policies.

The issue comes as competition between the US and China over AI development intensifies, with American companies including Anthropic and OpenAI competing against fast-developing Chinese developers such as DeepSeek and Alibaba.