Hong Kong users caught off guard as Anthropic tightens VPN access to Claude

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic appears to have stepped up enforcement of geographical restrictions on its Claude models in Hong Kong, with local users reporting abrupt account suspensions after accessing the service through virtual private networks (VPNs).

A wave of complaints surfaced on social media platforms X and Reddit on Thursday, as users who had operated accounts for months using VPNs found them suddenly disabled.

One Hong Kong-based user posted on the “r/claude” subreddit that they received an email from Anthropic’s safeguards team citing “suspicious signals” associated with their account, which would be revoked for usage policy violations.

“I used it with NordVPN from Hong Kong for six months and today this happened,” the user wrote, adding that they were trying to retrieve their conversation history and data.

While Anthropic has not publicly announced a new policy regarding VPNs, the sudden surge in suspensions suggests a deliberate tightening of long-standing regional restrictions. Hong Kong is excluded from Anthropic’s list of supported locations, alongside mainland China and Macau.

Despite these limits, tech-savvy users in the city had bypassed blocks by routing connections through supported markets like Singapore via VPNs and sometimes registering with foreign payment details.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday outside normal US business hours.

The apparent enforcement push comes amid growing friction between the San Francisco-based firm and Chinese developers. In a report published last month, Anthropic accused seven Chinese AI labs of conducting “industrial-scale” model distillation – harvesting outputs from Claude to train competing models.

Anthropic alleged that companies including Beijing-based Moonshot AI and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek circumvented geographic blocks using thousands of fraudulent accounts and third-party proxy networks.

Moonshot alone allegedly routed more than 23 million exchanges to Claude between May and July, disguised through accounts appearing to originate from Singapore and Japan. Beijing has rejected US allegations of AI distillation as groundless.

Geopolitical tensions have been growing around AI development.

In an essay last month calling on frontier labs to pace the release of advanced systems, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that a Chinese lead in AI would pose a “grave danger” to the world, urging Washington to maintain export controls on advanced semiconductors to China.