June 18 (Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic’s AI models, in a sign of intense scrutiny on the technology’s use outside the U.S., the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing three people familiar with the matter.
The wording of Anthropic’s usage terms in its licensing agreement with JPMorgan prompted the bank to remove Claude models from an internal drop-down list of approved large language models available to employees in the Asian financial hub, the report said.
The move follows a similar decision by Goldman Sachs, which in April removed Claude from a list of approved tools available to its Hong Kong-based bankers.
JPMorgan and Anthropic did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment outside business hours. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
The restrictions by the two Wall Street banks come amid rising U.S.-China tensions over AI technology, data security and access to advanced computing tools.
While AI models built by U.S. firms are not available in mainland China, Hong Kong has largely remained a market where some models operate, with usage limits set by U.S. companies.
Earlier this week, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, ordered the company to suspend exports of its Mythos and Fable AI models to destinations worldwide and all foreign nationals, citing concerns they could be used by military intelligence users in China, Russia and other countries of concern.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that negotiations with Anthropic are “going fine.”
(Reporting by Devika Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonia Cheema and Harikrishnan Nair)
