Anthropic’s regional restrictions on Claude are creating compliance headaches for enterprise customers, and OKX is now one of the companies affected. According to Bloomberg, the crypto exchange has started restricting Hong Kong employees from using Claude because of Anthropic’s geographic access policy.
Claude access restricted for Hong Kong-based OKX staff
Anthropic sets clear rules on where Claude can be used. Its official policy also lists creating an account from an unsupported location as one reason an account may be disabled.
That creates an extra layer of compliance work for multinational companies. Even if a company itself is based in a country supported by Anthropic, employees working across different jurisdictions may still be unable to use the same AI service because of where they are located.
After the issue came to light, OKX founder and CEO Star Xu said, 「We appreciate Anthropic’s constructive cooperation as we work together to resolve this matter and restore account access.」
Xu said OKX is working with Anthropic on a fix and seeking to restore account access. He also said the company will strengthen internal LLM permission controls so that only employees located in regions approved by Anthropic can use Claude.
Star Xu reveals OKX’s AI spending
Xu’s response also disclosed the scale of OKX’s AI rollout. He said the company is spending $6 million to $8 million a month on services from several top foundation model providers.
At that pace, OKX’s annual spending tied to foundation models would amount to roughly $72 million to $96 million.
Rather than having employees subscribe to ChatGPT or Claude separately, OKX has built an internal AI development platform called Oli. The platform brings multiple frontier models into one environment for product managers and engineers.
This setup lets developers avoid dependence on a single model. It also allows the company to route workloads across different foundation models based on the task, model capability, and compliance requirements.
Xu said that out of more than 1,000 weekly product releases and pull requests at OKX, more than 75% are now completed with support from Oli.
Other firms have made similar changes in Hong Kong
The report said Goldman Sachs had previously restricted Hong Kong bankers from using Claude. JPMorgan Chase later removed Claude from the list of internal large language models available to employees in Hong Kong.
Xu also said OKX is a global cryptocurrency and technology company, with main offices in California, New York, London, Dubai, Malta, Istanbul, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Given the current regulatory environment for the crypto industry, he said OKX does not operate in mainland China.