JPMorgan blocks Anthropic AI for Hong Kong staff, FT reports

TL;DR:

  • JPMorgan has stopped its Hong Kong staff accessing Anthropic’s Claude models, the Financial Times reports.
  • The wording of Anthropic’s licensing terms prompted the bank to drop Claude from its approved-tools list in the territory.
  • It follows a similar move by Goldman Sachs and intensifying US scrutiny of AI use outside America.

JPMorgan Chase has stopped staff in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic’s AI models, the Financial Times reported, in a sign of how intensely the technology’s use outside the US is now being scrutinised. According to the report, the wording of Anthropic’s usage terms in its licensing agreement with the bank prompted JPMorgan to remove Claude models from an internal list of approved large language models available to employees in the Asian financial hub.

Banks pull back

The move follows Goldman Sachs, which removed Claude from its approved tools for Hong Kong bankers in April. Both decisions come amid rising US-China tensions over AI, data security and access to advanced computing. While US-built models are unavailable in mainland China, Hong Kong has remained a market where some operate under usage limits set by American firms.

The pullback is the corporate edge of a fast-moving policy story. Earlier this week, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered Anthropic to suspend exports of its Mythos and Fable models worldwide and to all foreign nationals, citing fears of misuse by military intelligence in China and Russia — the export order Resultsense has tracked alongside Trump’s rejection of a UK exemption. President Trump said on Wednesday that negotiations with Anthropic were “going fine”, though neither the firm nor JPMorgan commented on the bank’s decision.

Looking forward

For UK financial institutions, the episode is a pointed reminder that AI access can be revoked or restricted by geography at short notice — a risk that cuts against firms embedding the technology deep into operations, as Janus Henderson has done with Claude. With Starmer already seeking a UK carve-out from the export curbs, banks operating across borders now face an awkward calculation: how much to rely on a US model whose availability is subject to Washington’s shifting national-security calls.

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