JPMorgan Chase has removed Anthropic's Claude models from the internal list of AI tools its staff in Hong Kong are allowed to use. There was no announcement, no regulatory order, no press conference. An employee simply opened a drop-down menu and found one fewer option than before.
The change, reported by the Financial Times on Thursday, traces back to the wording of Anthropic's licensing terms, which exclude usage across Greater China, including Hong Kong. JPMorgan's compliance and legal teams concluded that left them exposed, and pulled Claude from the approved list rather than argue the point.
This is the second time it has happened. Goldman Sachs made an almost identical move in April, stripping Claude from the tools available to its Hong Kong bankers while leaving other models, including Gemini and ChatGPT, untouched. Two of the most powerful financial institutions in the world have now reached the same conclusion independently: when a contract is ambiguous and the downside is regulatory, the easiest fix is to take the tool away.
