Emerging Tech & Weak Signals
How China’s gray market sells Claude tokens at a fraction of the price (The-Decoder)
Summary: Chinese developers are buying Claude tokens through ‘transfer stations’—API proxies hosted on overseas servers—at roughly 10 percent of the official price, bypassing Anthropic’s geoblocking, credit card checks, and even biometric verification. Operators cut costs by farming free credits, exploiting discounts, splitting Max plans, and swapping expensive models for cheaper ones. The modular supply chain, involving account brokers, SMS verification platforms, and reverse-engineering specialists, is resilient to shutdowns. According to Zilan Qian of the Oxford China Policy Lab, this gray market weakens Anthropic’s ability to monitor misuse and can fuel criminal markets around identity and payment fraud.
Why it matters: This gray market infrastructure hurts Anthropic’s business because it has already been used in large-scale distillation attacks by Chinese AI companies.
Context: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google recently began working together against unauthorized model copying by Chinese competitors. Anthropic had previously uncovered large-scale distillation attacks by Deepseek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, in which more than 24,000 fake accounts generated over 16 million requests.
Date: August 23, 2026 03:48 AM ET
URL: https://the-decoder.com/how-chinas-gray-market-sells-claude-tokens-at-a-fraction-of-the-price
Generated Analysis Tone: Neutral (50%)
Source Registry Score: 10.0/10 — High
Generated text and tone describe the analysis; the source registry score is not a factual truth rating.Post ID: 2347e9a2