According to CoinMeta, ByteDance plans to widely restrict employees from using personally purchased external tools such as Claude, Codex, etc. to access internal data starting from November. According to internal notifications, access to external tools will be prohibited for all company-level code repositories and Lark documents (L4), with some exceptions in certain scenarios like seed. Hong Dingkun, Vice President of Technology at ByteDance, stated that the consequences of leaking information at the L3 level and above could be severe. However, he emphasized that promoting their own products does not require forcing employees to use them by prohibiting other options, as this approach is ineffective. This is not the first time ByteDance has tightened restrictions on external tools; in May 2025, the company had already restricted the use of third-party tools such as Cursor and Windsurf due to employees using personal accounts, which led to business data being stored on those personal accounts.