Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and OKX have all cut Hong Kong staff off from Anthropic's Claude AI model, according to reports from Bloomberg. The three restrictions happened months apart, but all trace back to the same geographic access rules. Anthropic restricts Claude access in Hong Kong and mainland China, and all three financial institutions ran into that limit in separate incidents. Goldman Sachs cut Claude access for its Hong Kong staff earlier in 2026, while JPMorgan implemented its restriction more recently, and OKX followed suit after a brief suspension of the exchange's corporate Anthropic account.
OKX barred staff based in Hong Kong, or traveling through China, from using Claude following a brief suspension of the exchange's corporate Anthropic account, as reported by Bloomberg. The exchange stopped providing Claude access for staff in the region in early August after the suspension, according to a person familiar with the matter and internal messages viewed by Bloomberg News. The company has since restored the account and will route Hong Kong employees' AI requests to other models instead of Claude. OKX won't help staff use virtual private networks (VPNs) to reach Claude while traveling through the region. In a statement, OKX said it recently learned that some Hong Kong-based employees' use of Claude may not have fully complied with Anthropic's regional access policy. The company is currently spending $6 million to $8 million a month on multiple large language model services, with staff having used both Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT for work, though the company has internally viewed Claude as the more effective tool.
Goldman Sachs' restriction stemmed from a contract dispute, not a suspension, according to previous Bloomberg reports. The bank concluded its Anthropic contract didn't cover Hong Kong, and the restriction also applied to overseas staff visiting Hong Kong. Software engineers made up most of Claude's user base at the bank. In contrast to OKX, Goldman Sachs isn't retreating from Anthropic overall, with chief information officer Marco Argenti having embedded Anthropic engineers within the bank for months to build AI agents for trade accounting and client vetting.
Hong Kong's government has voiced support for AI adoption among financial firms, but restrictions from AI developers like Anthropic complicate that push, as reported by Bloomberg. The overlap between the firms' restrictions points to a wider pattern as Washington and Beijing are competing hard for AI supremacy, with Chinese AI models closing the gap with US developers. This competition pushes US AI firms to draw harder lines around who can use their technology and where. US officials have been issuing public warnings about Chinese AI companies ahead of planned discussions between the two countries in September. Meanwhile, Hong Kong is tightening its crypto market rules, with licensed platforms now able to offer perpetual contracts to professional investors and brokers providing crypto margin financing under the new framework. OKX reported strong crypto payment growth, with card purchase volume in Europe rising 280% from a year earlier this summer and transactions increasing 178%, as customers used cards for groceries, transport and everyday expenses. Across the industry, spending through crypto-linked cards reached a record $759 million in July, showing wider use of digital assets for payments.
