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Current Affairs

Hong Kong must wake up to the cold hard geopolitics of AI

Officials talking about artificial intelligence (AI) often speak in terms of the next industrial revolution or existential risks. Such rhetoric ultimately does little to capture…

By Samantha Johnson / July 24, 2026

Officials talking about artificial intelligence (AI) often speak in terms of the next industrial revolution or existential risks. Such rhetoric ultimately does little to capture how AI filters into the ordinary workings of a city like Hong Kong.

The geopolitics of AI are no longer abstract. They are beginning to shape who can use which tools – and on what terms.

Over the past few months, two major international banks in the city have reportedly felt the impact. Anthropic’s Claude, a generative AI tool used by staff at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, was apparently removed from internal systems used by Hong Kong-based teams.

The move amounts to more than an inconvenience. If colleagues in Singapore or New York retain access while those in Hong Kong do not, the city’s position as a global financial hub is weakened. Claude’s removal is not merely a corporate adjustment. It is a warning that AI is increasingly treated as a strategic asset, rather than as neutral infrastructure.

Behind those adjustments lies a more complex geography of access. Some advanced systems now include regional carve-outs excluding “Greater China”. Anthropic has made clear that Claude is not officially supported in Hong Kong. For local employees, the reasoning matters less than the effect: tools treated as routine elsewhere can disappear overnight.

The situation became clearer in June, when Anthropic received a US export control directive requiring it to suspend foreign nationals’ access to its newest models. The company temporarily disabled the systems worldwide.

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