JPMorgan cuts off Anthropic access for Hong Kong staff

This article was published on June 18, 2026 The bank pulled Claude from its approved-tools list in Hong Kong over licensing terms, the second Wall Street firm to do so. JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from using Anthropic’s AI models, according to the Financial Times, a quiet decision with loud implications. The bank removed Anthropic’s Claude from the internal drop-down list of approved large language models available to employees in the territory, the FT reported, leaving them without access to one of the tools their colleagues elsewhere can still use. The reason, per the report, was not performance but paperwork. The wording of Anthropic’s usage terms in its licensing agreement with JPMorgan prompted the bank to pull Claude from the approved list in Hong Kong specifically. The detail matters: this is a contractual and jurisdictional decision, not a verdict on the model, and it isolates the restriction to one of the most geopolitically sensitive financial hubs in the world. JPMorgan is not the first major bank to do this. Goldman Sachs removed Claude from the list of approved tools available to its Hong Kong-based bankers in April, the FT noted, which makes JPMo