Six of roughly 30 tenants in a single Beijing office building are in the same business: reselling access to Anthropic’s Claude. The building sits in Haidian, the district that houses the city’s universities and tech firms, and The Information reports the resellers advertise openly on GitHub, Taobao and Telegram. The intermediaries call themselves ‘transfer stations’: proxy services that take a prompt from a Chinese developer, forward it to Claude through an overseas account, and collect payment in RMB via WeChat or Alipay. Some sell Claude tokens at 70–90% below Anthropic’s official prices, with one benchmark pegged at 1 RMB per US dollar of API credit. The supply side is bulk-registered accounts. Operators farm free API credits, exploit corporate discounts, buy accounts with stolen card details and USDT-funded cards, or subdivide $200 Max subscription plans across dozens of users. Tom’s Hardware summarises how the proxies sustain their prices: ‘stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users’ prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data.’ Model substitution is the one the buyer rarely sees. A customer paying for Claude Opus can get a cheaper Anthropic tier back, or a domestic Chinese model such as Qwen relabelled as Claude on the way out. None of this is new to Anthropic. In February the company said roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts had been tied to Chinese labs including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, and the Haidian gray market has grown around that enforcement anyway. submitted by /u/Justgototheeffinmoon
Originally posted by u/Justgototheeffinmoon on r/ArtificialInteligence
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