Just after landing in Hong Kong, the talented programmer has fallen.

Is this causing Hong Kong 🇭🇰, the top financial center, to form a "data island"?
Domestic "distillation technology" makes these top AI models fearsome.
Since Goldman Sachs has taken the lead, in the coming weeks, we may see institutions like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase in Hong Kong gradually follow with similar "compliance explanations" 🥲🥲
Goldman Sachs Hong Kong employees are banned from using Claude: Business trips to Hong Kong are also not allowed, and Anthropic @AnthropicAI states it has never officially supported Hong Kong.
Employees at Goldman Sachs' Hong Kong office have been unable to access Anthropic's Claude model through the internal AI platform for several weeks. The restrictions are based on geographic location: employees traveling from overseas to Hong Kong are also unable to access it during their stay. The main affected users are software engineers using Claude for coding and financial modeling.
Goldman Sachs has interpreted the contract terms with Anthropic strictly and, after negotiations, determined that Hong Kong employees should not use any Anthropic products. An Anthropic spokesperson told the Financial Times that Claude has never been officially "supported" in Hong Kong but declined to provide further details. This restriction does not involve other AI providers like OpenAI; Goldman Sachs employees can still use ChatGPT and Gemini on internal platforms.
The core concern for US AI companies restricting Hong Kong usage is "distillation": local institutions train their models by intensively calling outputs from foreign models. ChatGPT and Claude have been blocked in mainland China, but Hong Kong was previously largely unrestricted, with usage boundaries set by US companies themselves. Hong Kong is a major investment banking and cross-border transaction hub for most global banks in Greater China. If employees cannot use the most powerful models, they may fall behind other teams. The Financial Times states that it is still unclear whether other banks or companies have implemented similar restrictions.