Is Claude Allowed in China? What Anthropic's Supported Regions Policy Says (2026)
Anthropic publishes a Supported Regions list covering roughly 195 countries and territories, and mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are not on it. Taiwan is. The same coverage applies to both the API and Claude.ai. So the honest answer to "is Claude allowed in China" is no — and the constraint is contractual, not technical.
What the Supported Regions policy actually says
Anthropic's supported-countries page describes the list as the "countries, regions, and territories where we currently offer commercial API access," with a parallel list for Claude.ai access. The two lists have identical coverage — there is no arrangement where the consumer product is available somewhere the API is not.
Three facts from that page are worth stating precisely, because secondhand summaries garble them:
- Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are absent from the supported list.
- Taiwan is listed as supported. People frequently assume a single regional policy covers all of Greater China; the published list does not work that way.
- The policy also reserves a right at the ownership level: "To the extent permitted by law, Anthropic reserves the right to not provide its products or services to entities whose majority direct or indirect ownership is attributable to nations other than those listed in our Supported Regions Policy."
That last clause is the one teams most often miss. Eligibility is not only about where a person is sitting or where a server is. It can attach to who owns the entity holding the account.
This is an eligibility question, not a connectivity question
The most common framing error is treating this as a network problem with a network solution. It is not. Availability here is governed by the terms you accept and the entity and billing method you present when provisioning access.
Two consequences follow, and they are worth being blunt about:
Reaching the endpoint is not the same as being eligible to use it. Whether a request completes says nothing about whether the account was permitted under the terms. Arranging network-level access from an unsupported region does not create eligibility, and using the service contrary to Anthropic's terms puts the account at risk regardless of how the traffic was routed. This article does not cover methods for doing that, because there is no version of it that is compliant.
Payment is usually where it stops, not signup. A card issued outside a supported region is the common hard stop, and retrying the signup flow does not change it. That mechanic is covered in more depth in how Claude API access actually works.
What this means in practice, by situation
|
Your situation |
Where you stand |
|---|---|
|
Entity, billing and operations in a supported region (including Taiwan) |
Standard access; provision normally |
|
Multinational with a subsidiary in a supported region |
Usually provisioned through that entity — check the ownership clause applies to your structure |
|
Entity and ownership attributable to a non-listed nation |
May be declined under the ownership clause even with supported-region billing |
|
Individual in mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau, no supported-region entity |
Not served; there is no compliant self-service route |
The bottom row is the one people want a workaround for, and it is the row where an honest answer is simply that the official channels do not serve it.
The enterprise cloud routes have their own region lists
Claude models are also sold through major cloud platforms, and teams sometimes assume a cloud contract sidesteps the question. It does not — it replaces one region list with another, and you have to read the new one.
Amazon Bedrock is the clearest case to check, because AWS publishes per-model regional availability. Its region list for Claude models spans North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and South America — and the AWS China regions (Beijing cn-north-1 and Ningxia cn-northwest-1) do not appear on it. Notably, ap-east-2 (Taipei) does.
Google Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry likewise publish their own availability documentation. Rather than trusting any summary — including this one — check the current published region list for the specific platform and region you intend to deploy in, since these lists change and a stale answer is worse than none.
The general shape holds across all three: a cloud route inherits that cloud's procurement, billing and compliance posture. That is genuinely useful for an enterprise with an existing contract and a supported-region deployment footprint. It is not a route around the region question for someone who has no such footprint.
If you are evaluating rather than deploying
If the goal is to understand cost or integration effort before an entity question is settled, that work does not require access. Rates and the variables that actually drive a bill are public — see what drives Claude API pricing — and the integration surface is documented well enough to scope work against, as in how to use the Claude API. Settle the eligibility question separately, with whoever owns contracts at your organization.
FAQ
Is Claude available in mainland China?
No. Anthropic's Supported Regions list does not include mainland China, and the same coverage applies to both the API and Claude.ai.
Is Claude banned in China, or just unavailable?
The published policy describes where Anthropic offers commercial access, not a ban imposed on it. Practically the result is the same — mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are outside the regions Anthropic serves.
Is Claude available in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan?
Taiwan is on Anthropic's supported list. Hong Kong and Macau are not. The region policy treats them separately rather than as one bloc.
Does a company in China with an overseas subsidiary qualify?
It depends on the structure, not on the network. Anthropic reserves the right to decline entities whose majority direct or indirect ownership is attributable to non-listed nations, so this is a question for whoever handles contracts, not for engineering.
Does using a cloud platform like Bedrock change the answer?
Only if you deploy in a region that platform serves. AWS's published regional availability for Claude models does not include the AWS China regions, so a cloud contract relocates the region question rather than removing it.