JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from using Anthropic's Claude AI models, according to the Financial Times, which broke the story citing sources. Reuters subsequently reported on the FT's findings.
The move makes JPMorgan the second major Wall Street bank to restrict access to Claude in the Asian financial hub. According to the Financial Times, JPMorgan is following Goldman Sachs, which already barred its own people from using the chatbot there.
The banks have not laid out a single, detailed public rationale across these reports, but the cited reasons point in two directions. According to Newsbytes, JPMorgan removed Claude from its list of approved AI tools for Hong Kong employees over the software's licensing terms, and against a backdrop of growing US-China tensions surrounding artificial intelligence.
It is worth being precise about scope: the reporting describes a restriction specific to Hong Kong staff, not a firmwide ban on Anthropic's technology. The sources do not detail whether employees in other regions are affected, nor what alternative tools the bank is steering its Hong Kong workforce toward.
Why it matters: Wall Street has raced to put generative AI into the hands of employees, so when two of the biggest banks independently wall off a leading model in one of Asia's key financial centers, it signals that legal terms and geopolitical risk—not just capability—are now shaping which AI tools workers are actually allowed to use.