Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90% off by using stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users' prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data — 'transfer stations' operate through proxy networks that harvest user data | Tom's Hardware

One way to catch up quickly! Has happened before in history and in other countries!

"A grey-market economy of API proxy services in China is reselling access to Anthropic's Claude models at as little as 10% of the official price, according to an investigation published Monday by Oxford China Policy Lab researcher Zilan Qian.

The proxy networks, known in Chinese developer communities as "transfer stations," operate openly on platforms including GitHub, Taobao, and Telegram, and sustain their rock-bottom pricing through a combination of stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users' prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data.

These findings give credence to the warnings issued in recent weeks by both the White House and Anthropic, the former of which accused Chinese entities in late April of running “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier models using tens of thousands of proxy accounts. Anthropic disclosed similar activity in February, identifying roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts linked to Chinese labs, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. ..."

"... On the map of Anthropic’s supported countries, China is conspicuously absent, and on the Chinese internet, so is Anthropic – technically speaking. In reality, neither Anthropic’s blockage nor the Great Firewall stops Chinese users from accessing Claude and Claude Code. Claude models have thrived on e-commerce apps like Taobao despite supposed platform and government censorship since 2025, and Singapore, with a population smaller than that of New York City, “surprisingly” leads global per capita use of Anthropic’s Claude in April 2026. ..."

Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90% off by using stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users' prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data — 'transfer stations' operate through proxy networks that harvest user data | Tom's Hardware "Researchers find proxy services discreetly swap AI models and log everything."

How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China "The Transfer Station Economy, Explained"

Credits: Last Week in AI