The strictest access controls in the AI industry are not enough to stop the gray market. An analysis by Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab published in ChinaTalk, documents how "transfer stations" in China sell Claude tokens at roughly 10% of the official price, bypassing geoblocking and biometric verification.

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A Modular Supply Chain

These API proxies, hosted on overseas servers, accept requests in yuan via WeChat or Alipay and forward them to Anthropic as if they came from legitimate locations. The structure is highly resilient: providers operate on single links in a chain that includes account brokers, foreign phone number platforms, and resellers on Taobao. If one node is blocked, downstream customers remain intact, and operational replacements can be spun up within hours.

Model Swapping and Data Theft

To justify such low prices, operators use aggressive techniques. They exploit free credits and shared Max plans, but most importantly, they practice "dilution": the proxy silently reroutes requests intended for expensive models like Opus 4.7 to cheaper alternatives or Chinese models like Qwen. Research from the CISPA Helmholtz Center confirmed this practice across 17 analyzed proxies.

The most serious risk, however, is log monetization. Every request passes through the proxy, exposing prompts, responses, and codebase context to potential buyers of data for distillation. As noted by Chinese developers, the token business might just be customer acquisition: the real margin lies in the logs.

Security and Market Implications

This infrastructure weakens Anthropic's monitoring capabilities, making it difficult to trace coordinated abuse. It also feeds collateral criminal markets: biometric data used to bypass KYC checks can be resold, and account farming supports financial fraud. This phenomenon fits into an already tense context where Anthropic has recently accused Alibaba of orchestrating the largest AI theft in history and has cut off services to firms under Chinese control to combat unauthorized distillation.