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Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity f

Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing them to operate below cost. Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China. You need to use a VPN to access either, and you can't pay with a Chinese bank card. So most people who want access to Claude buy access via a reseller. It's the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China. These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots. Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 at a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?provider=Anthropic https://yunwu.ai/pricing?provider=Anthropic This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. I shared this story a few months back, but it never got any traction. It explains the token resale economy in China, it's an excellent read https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

epsteingpt 4mo ago
How are they 'streaming' the responses and 'pooling' the tokens? Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
- bagels 4mo ago
  They probably asked claude how to do it.
- paxys 4mo ago
  Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.
  - walrus01 4mo ago
    Not going to work for very long or at any scale coming from datacenter/hosting provider IPs. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of how they snowshoe the traffic.
    - paxys 4mo ago
      As long as you stick to a single unique IP per account it isn't going to get flagged.
      - walrus01 4mo ago
        Respectfully, no, that's not how it works. You think the people running anti-fraud and anti-bot measures don't have tools that know the specific ipv4 and ipv6 CIDR ranges of every ASN that they categorize as hosting/colo providers? And that's just as a basic first effort reject measure to prevent automation tools from using things designed for human-interactive use only. Go try to do many of these things from Cogent IP space and see how long your project lasts.
        awakeasleep 4mo ago
        Sorry for being a newb here but are you saying Anthropic blocks people from running claude code on datacenter ip ranges? Or is the datacenter IP just one part of the picture?
        elwebmaster 4mo ago
        Nonsense. Many if not all legit Claude users are using Claude Code inside their Cloud servers. How else would you use it anyway? For just local dev? That's so 2000 and late bro.
        walrus01 4mo ago
        No, I'm not saying it's the exclusive and only measure (that would indeed be something we might see 20, 25 years ago), it's one of a myriad of discrete datapoints used to determine if an account is authentic or not. There's a lot of inauthentic coordinated automated systems these days along the general lines of scraping/crawling/social media manipulation/sockpuppetry that require running through residential proxies or proxies to places that don't look like datacenter IP space.
- teravor 4mo ago
  > Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China? why would anyone do that? you do realize the laptop farm case was work computers? the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
  - globalnode 4mo ago
    that explains why theyre blocking me. i have privacy controls up high and they must think im a chinese residential proxy bot
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- tristanj 4mo ago
  The resellers route requests via one of thousands of Claude Max 5x accounts. When an account reaches its usage limit, they automatically switch to another account.
  - kristofferR 4mo ago
    Why would they use Max 5x instead of Max 20x, which is cheaper relatively speaking?
    - tristanj 4mo ago
      You're right, they're using the $200 Max plan, which I thought was the 5x plan. It's talked about in the article I linked.
    - dannyw 4mo ago
      Don’t trust my experiences as fact since it’s a bit opaque, but I believe 20x only offers 4x the 5hr session limits. The weekly limit is still 2x, which is the same as the price increase.
- chews 4mo ago
  ask your gpt how does openrouter work, then ask, how do proxies work.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
Thats pretty crazy. This kind of thing jeopardizes Claude Max.
- avaer 4mo ago
  If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.
  - gruez 4mo ago
    But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.
    - TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
      There's still per-window and weekly limits though, so it's not really like that.
      - gruez 4mo ago
        Office 365 is licensed per seat/account, but each account has a 5 device limit. Do you think it's fair game for an enterprising person to sub license each account to 5 people, 1 device each?
        TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
        I wouldn't do it personally for the same reason I wouldn't share my toothbrush with 5 people.
    - wslh 4mo ago
      You can write whatever contract you like, the problem is how to enforce it, and a greater problem is enforcing it around the world.
fwipsy 4mo ago
Hm! In this context, introducing ID verification may have been a significant silver lining to the order to take down Fable for Anthropic. This also sheds a very different light on people saying that competitive open-source models are undermining frontier labs' business model.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  The chinese have already worked around the ID verification, by recruiting people in low-income countries to complete the checks for less than 30 USD per account (so much for Altman's Worldcoin). https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-market-sells-claude-102000667.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-marke...
gruez 4mo ago
>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs. >Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
- weird-eye-issue 4mo ago
  You can use it as an API unlike the subscription.
- spindump8930 4mo ago
  > Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.
  - Mr_Xpes 4mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- tristanj 4mo ago
  It's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass. There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.
  - 4mo ago
xgstation 4mo ago
> This is one reason why Deepseek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. This one does not make sense to me at all. Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.
- tristanj 4mo ago
  DeepSeek permanently cut its V4-pro API prices by 75% because they were too expensive. Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens. Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.
  - ammo1662 4mo ago
    China also have trust issue with American companies. Most of State-owned companies will not use those services even if they can directly access them.
    - nekusar 4mo ago
      And? The US feds wont allow even local Qwen or Deepseek models either. "Evul godless commies" or some such nonsense.
  - ffsm8 4mo ago
    Urm, no? I man they did cut prices by 75% that part is true - but they reduced a starting price that was below sonnet. Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.
    - furyofantares 4mo ago
      Is there a contradiction here? If resold Opus tokens are sold at a 93% discount, you can be a lot cheaper than Sonnet while also a lot more expensive than resold Opus tokens.
rconti 4mo ago
Wait, so is your theory mutually exclusive to Anthropic's claims of "theft of capabilities"?
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  No, this reseller 中转站 thing is basically a loss leader for certain chinese ai labs to distill claude with verified human input.
  - chinathrow 4mo ago
    How do you gain insights such as this?
- tristanj 4mo ago
  Not really. I think Anthropic focuses on identifiable distillation attacks rather than the (even larger) industrial-scale token harvesting and reselling operation, because they don’t want people to know how easy it is to get cheap Claude tokens. Once people realize they can access Anthropic models at a 90% discount, they won’t want to pay full API prices anymore.
- bandrami 4mo ago
  No, it's part of the capability theft. They resell Claude tokens cheaply and then simultaneously log everything for distillation. Even if they take a small loss on the token sales it's much cheaper than the equivalent compute.
HeavenFox 4mo ago
Also just plain old fraud: selling Chinese models as Opus. With the capabilities of Chinese models catching up fast, this is getting more and more difficult to detect.
avsteele 4mo ago
What does this have to do with Alibaba? Are you saying Alibaba is the reseller? If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.
- lokar 4mo ago
  They buy the logs from the bot farmers
  - maxnevermind 4mo ago
    Are logs somehow used for the purpose of training their own models or something else?
    - floam 4mo ago
      Distillation from having enough logs
dwa3592 4mo ago
>>Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. Can someone with more understanding dumb it down for me please. Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price???? why would XYZ offer this at a loss like that when they could just offer it at Anthropic's price??? The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".
- hoten 4mo ago
  Because Anthropic's subscriptions come with X amount of tokens / week, and divided by the subscription cost it is WAY less than what they charge per-token (the "API price") beyond that. So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.
- VladVladikoff 4mo ago
  They probably buy the plans instead of the API tokens, and resell access via a custom API that routes to the plans. So you presumably get cheaper access this way than paying API pricing.
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  > Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price???? Yes, as they explained they do it through things like pooling accounts, straight up payment fraud, and double-dipping by selling the logs of the conversations to chinese AI labs so that they can train their own models on it. > The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6". There might be some that try this, but they would get caught very quickly, there's still a moat between Claude and Deepseek, even in casual use. Look up Zilan Qian's reporting if you want more detail.
  - neves 4mo ago
operatingthetan 4mo ago
This story reads like a William Gibson novel. Wild times.
alexnewman 4mo ago
But I can rebuild glm Using open source methods…
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  And there are a ton of Claude conversation logs (with CoT/inference) with no clear provenance circulating freely on huggingface, guess where they (likely) come from.
  - yoavm 4mo ago
    Wouldn't all of them be in Mandarin according to this theory? Are they?
golergka 4mo ago
Needless to say, they also collect all the data and sell it to labs which want to distill the models they’re serving.
tamimio 4mo ago
Im ok with this! Is there a site that list all these resellers, or better, a openrouter-like for these resellers?
- tristanj 4mo ago
  They're called 中转站 (transfer stations/proxies). They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. I linked a larger operator in the parent comment, or have a look at https://hvoy.ai/ https://hvoy.ai/ which lists a ton. You can also find many on Funpay, which may be easier to use. This is one seller I found, they're reselling "real Max 20x subscription accounts", at ~97% below official API prices https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310 https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310 Note that whoever you buy from will be able to read all your tokens, so don’t use it for anything confidential/financial.
  - ValentineC 4mo ago
    > They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. Random, but are the frontier AI providers like ChatGPT better at searching the Chinese internet now? When I was in China a few months ago and asking AI for restaurant recommendations, all the US frontier providers were pretty useless, or plain out hallucinating, even if I specifically ask them to search Dianping (Yelp for China).
    - tristanj 4mo ago
      I'm not sure. I use Grok for most of my esoteric searches and it does quite well. I explicitly prompt it to search in the language most relevant to that query, and found it does quite well. I also tell it to respond back in English. Often, there is not enough information available in English about nice regional topics. I know ChatGPT had an issue where it only tried to search in English (unless prompted) and the answers were not great.
  - nkzd 4mo ago
    How did you even find these? Even in discussions about cheap AI I've never seen anyone mention this. Great find!
areoform 4mo ago
Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to. Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way. I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility. Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless. So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function, f(text) -> (text_transform) where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/language_models_are_implicitly_continuous.pdf https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag... According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function. Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product. I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process; Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm. Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered) You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google. You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians. It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out. And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos." Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please." Just saying.
irlib 4mo ago
Where are you getting cheap GLM5.2? It is about 1/3 the price of Opus, which is not what I would call cheap.
- spoaceman7777 4mo ago
  Depending on the provider, GLM-5.2 is between 4.5-5x cheaper than Opus. You can compare prices/speed/etc. for basically all relevant models on aa https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers
- tw1984 4mo ago
  a company can just download GLM 5.2 and start self hosting this model using the chip designed and made by itself. That could lower the cost by 20-30x. for hobbyist buying a few Mac Studio to host GLM 5.2 at home, the cost might 10x more than just using Opus API.
- zoexiong 4mo ago
  Hugging Face plus Z.ai API makes sense to me. Due to creators get paid, they can keep building better models, and the local-running community benefits from that over time. AIhubmix currently is the cheapest rather than openrouter.
abofh 4mo ago
Somebody figured out how to make the trial profitable! I don't really feel bad about anyone here, they were subsidizing to get people hooked, someone turned the subsidies into profit when they got selective pricing mode enabled, it was always going to be arbitrage. But the winner is the guy in the middle in a jurisdiction that will likely be judgement proof, because everything they capture, both input and out, and if available, thinking tokens -- are gonna be for sale as soon as you cut off their other revenue. Zero knowledge was a commitment Anthropic took seriously, until it got inconvenient. So, people reselling their leftover plan crumbs? Probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's civil, and I wish Anthropics lawyers actually closing Streisand's LLM
- junofan 4mo ago
  I don’t follow your reasoning. It is foreign to me. You talk about winners, but this is clearly fraud.
  - akersten 4mo ago
    Fraud? Anthropic sells some undisclosed and ever-changing number of tokens for $200, the customer uses those tokens. If there's any fraud here, it's that the $200 next month is silently worth fewer tokens than the last.
  - gosub100 4mo ago
    Won't you think of the poor, POOR AI companies!
yokisan 4mo ago
One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright: - Purchase multiple accounts via resellers - Send messages that contain a UID - Capture these in Anthropic's logs - Shut down account. Use any metadata to identify related accounts /loop
- akersten 4mo ago
  This, just like blanking out a football stream for a split second to binary search and find IPTV rebroadcasters, is far too good a solution. Suits prefer to make it seem like their job of fighting "misuse" is hard, justify their budget, continued existence of the trust & safety department, face scans, etc.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- NetOpWibby 4mo ago
  They could be doing this internally and want to see if they can downright eliminate these loopholes before bringing Fable back. I don't care how they do it, I just want to use Fable again.
- killingtime74 4mo ago
  Maybe Fable is not as capable as thought? On the one hand they talk it up as world ending and on the other hand they can't manage bot accounts on their own service. I want to hear how this can be rationalised. From the article "every layer of control frontier US AI companies have added (geoblocking, phone verification, credit card requirements, and now live biometric KYC checks) has produced a corresponding layer of evasion infrastructure".
  - suzzer99 4mo ago
    No system is foolproof. They'd have to be willing to throw out some % of good customers along with the bots. Amazon can do that because they have a monopoly already. Anthropic can't risk it when they're trying to grab market share.
charcircuit 4mo ago
Why aren't these on openrouter?
- tristanj 4mo ago
  Probably because Openrouter is a US based company, and they don't want to be sued by Anthropic/OpenAI.
- SXX 4mo ago
  Obviously because you cant join open router and start serving OpenAI / Anthropic models.
icfly2 4mo ago
[flagged]
- 8note 4mo ago
  i still want those data sets to become public domain. open weights still isnt good enough
  - bendews 4mo ago
    That's the conundrum isn't it? Anyone that posts their datasets would be immediately sued/blocked/boycotted to oblivion due to the obvious and blatant data theft, not to mention IP and copyright issues.
    - timschmidt 4mo ago
      Nvidia's even being sued for providing scripts which automate the downloading of said data from non-Nvidia sources. We certainly don't need copyrights that last nearly a century after the author's death (they literally cannot help the author), so here's hoping that some of the disputes over all this money changing hands can reign in some of the existing copyright sprawl. A stronger public domain would provide more useful training data for everyone, including open source models, and make criminals out of fewer AI researchers.
- anileated 4mo ago
  The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. I would not say PRC making LLMs cheaper is the best outcome (though it is better than nothing). The best outcome would be to make the practice of training on our data without consent illegal, which would simultaneously slow down economic change and make it more organic as well as give PRC companies less capabilities to extract.
  - overfeed 4mo ago
    > The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. There is no IP theft because LLM outputs aren't protected, just egregious ToS violations.
jnaina 4mo ago
no honor among thieves.
overfeed 4mo ago
> which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots. Lol. The irony is thick for anyone who ever had to attempt defense against an onslaught of American AI lab crawlers that ignore robots.txt
- a34729t 4mo ago
  Yeah nobody is gonna be shedding any tears for them
temporaryacc2 4mo ago
Thank you for your very informative comment! (It's a shame almost all replies are just the same contrived pessisism found on every Anthropic thread on HN).
- eloisius 4mo ago
  Indeed! It’s so hard to find reasonable takes on AI that aren’t littered with accounts created 11 days ago that only post in threads related to Anthropic for some reason
  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - ErwinsArm 4mo ago
    the bots are strong in the ai space lmao
Lio 4mo ago
I’m surprised that instead of cutting them off Anthropic doesn’t just switch them to a lower quality, cheaper to models. That would seem more effective than simply shutting down the accounts. Keep them paying for junk.
- eloisius 4mo ago
  That sounds like it would actually be fraud.
  - LoganDark 4mo ago
    Not if you simply say in the terms of service that it's allowed. Then suddenly it's normal (every company does this). Similarly to how the terms of service can simply say you're not allowed to sue.
    - wqaatwt 4mo ago
      > how the terms of service can simply say you're not allowed to sue. That doesn’t necessarily mean much. You can put plenty of outrageous statements into any contract that automatically doesn’t make them binding.
    - gf000 4mo ago
      It's maybe how it works in the US, but that sure as hell not how it works in the EU (my snark wants to continue as "or any sane legislature")
      - LoganDark 4mo ago
        Anthropic is based in the US. Unfortunately, too late to edit my comment to say "US company"
  - Lio 4mo ago
    That's an interesting point but I'd ask who would Anthropic be defrauding? The Chinese resellers that are happily operating outside of the terms of service? Or the reseller's customers, that are knowingly buying a potentially fake service? Or Alibaba, also using resellers to break terms of service with the aim of attacking Anthropic's business? INAL but I think Anthropic would be able to argue an "unclean hands defence" to prove they are not defrauding anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_hands_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_hands_doctrine In short, you can't knowingly break a contract and then complain that someone else is not treating you fairly with regard to that same contract.
maxloh 4mo ago
> They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. Claude never provides the raw reasoning chain. What you see is just a summary of that reasoning. Getting the full thinking output requires an enterprise agreement. https://patrickmccanna.net/the-text-in-claude-codes-extended-thinking-output-is-not-authentic/ https://patrickmccanna.net/the-text-in-claude-codes-extended...
- tancop 4mo ago
  how hard is it to find a manager or ops team member at one of the enterprise companies and buy lets say 100gb of logs? the chinese lab can promise to anonymize the data before training, not release it raw and pay a good price. honestly you might just need to get data from a couple long sessions and feed it back to another model as an example to make synthetic reasoning chains. if the emulator model is good enough it should work.
  - dgellow 4mo ago
    I would expect that to be very hard
alliao 4mo ago
don't buy your drugs from shady operators children! always get it from the source
ycui7 4mo ago
Those resellers are simply just selling Kimi K2.5 or GLM5.1 as counterfeit Opus. We, Chinese, know how to play the counterfeit game for a long time in so many industry.
- osti 4mo ago
  That's not true, some of them are indeed fake, but a lot of them are actually providing real opus at low cost doing what op said.
  - petesergeant 4mo ago
    Genuinely, can you provide a better source here than "trust me bro"?
    - osti 4mo ago
      I read quite a few posts about this on RedNote.
  - theli0nheart 4mo ago
    I just tested the provider that the OP mentioned extensively yesterday, and the models they're selling are definitely not from Anthropic. The voice "sounds" like Sonnet or Opus at first glance, but the intelligence is definitely not there.
bg24 4mo ago
Great point, and this is on the vendor (Anthropic) to address. Typical fraud issue. OP is about modeling distilling the capabilities.
blitzar 4mo ago
> Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices How dare they. Only Anthropic is allowed to sell its tokens at 70-90% below the API prices.
nicce 4mo ago
> These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots. Don’t put that on Chinese.
eru 4mo ago
> This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. Sounds a bit circular? Aren't the companies working on these models than also the ones that are paying the subsidy (via paying for training data)?
arkh 4mo ago
It's fucking laughable to see people complain about what they did and still do. Using illicitly extracted data? That's all main LLM playbook. Onslaught of bots? Ask where the bots almost DOSing most internet sites for the last couple years come from. As some people would say: Cheh
smashah 4mo ago
Amazing thank you chinese resellers. This is a perfect way to undermine The Great Satan's Genocide Machine's chosen model comapnies.
mellosouls 4mo ago
Interesting article - your discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165492
ilangge 4mo ago
This may be the truth behind the alleged distillation incident.
petesergeant 4mo ago
> payments fraud One of these things is not like the others... If Anthropic could show that Chinese commercial competitors were using payments fraud to do this, they would be shouting it from the rooftops.
bryceneal 4mo ago
I have 0 sympathy for Anthropic. Their latest models are extremely censored. The Fable rollout was horrible. Their Cyber Access program criteria denies doxxed Americans doing legitimate security work. Anthropic is hostile to their users and hostile to their own country. OpenAI is considerably better on all of these fronts, but still not perfect. I'm happy to use and support Chinese model developers if it means less censorship and gatekeeping. I have absolutely no dog in this fight, and neither do most American developers. We will use whatever is cheaper and better. Game on.
- tristanj 4mo ago
  Chinese models are the exact opposite of what you claim to want, they are all highly censored, even more so than Anthropic models, with government mandated censorship.
  - bryceneal 4mo ago
    Your take does not reflect the reality on the ground. The Chinese models are censored on a narrow range of political topics which have nothing to do with my work. The weights are open and they can be uncensored/abliterated with little effort.
  - deaton 4mo ago
    Open-weight models can be abliterated automatically with open source tools though and completely decensored. You can't do that with a closed cloud model.
sorenjan 4mo ago
I think companies should do this too, in a smaller scale. Proxy all LLM traffic to and from your employees, and use it to fine tune a smaller local model.
whywhywhywhy 4mo ago
Considering how Claude and GPT were trained selling this as training data is completely justified.
LastTrain 4mo ago
Good for them!
windexh8er 4mo ago
Even if what you say is the truth (I don't think that is what's actually happening) it sounds to me like fair play capitalism working as intended! I guess when you rip off the entire Internet and then turn around and complain about getting ripped off nobody cares or feels for you. If there's a master class in getting the entire world to hate you then both Sam and Dario will be the prime examples.
samuelknight 4mo ago
I didn't connect the reseller pricing to DS and GLM prices until you explained it. Very good observation. Deepseek v4 pro in particular is priced so low that it's hard to imagine that they have any margin. 0.76/1.52 for a 1.6T param model leaves very little margin. Even the domestic providers on Openrouter are multiples of the price https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro
jwang987 4mo ago
they even resell GPT codex usage at 1~5% API costs. OpenAI has 1-month free trial promo in some regions, and they harvest free accounts in a large scale. I have a wechat contact that offers 98% off for GPT 5.5 and he's still profitable
throwawayffffas 4mo ago
> Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices That is not what they are claiming, not in this article at least. It's the distillation they are complaining about.
4d4m 4mo ago
Thanks. This is a widely misunderstood part of the market that the frontier companies are either unaware of, or don't see as a threat. Consumers are flocking to this, its better than dealing with their limits, changes, and opaque pricing. Funny enough, frontier companies are literally training their users to seek alternatives, local models, and distilled models to meet their throughput needs.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago
  It’s not that they don’t understand that it’s a problem, it’s just that the easy way to address it is with reduced, flat-rate pricing… but they are already losing gobs of cash on their regular users. Their business model, as it stands, is not sustainable. That’s not saying they won’t find a stable one, but the one they have now is definitely not. The external cash is drying up, and they need to figure out a way to shed the low-revenue users, and charge the remaining users a lot more or they’re going to go under. They would probably do a goddamned backflip if every flat rate user that wasn’t willing to switch to API pricing went local, or even better, went with a competitor.
pseudohadamard 4mo ago
"How dare someone rip off the stuff that we've stolen!".
dilyevsky 4mo ago
Why cant anthropic just sign up to those resellers, rack up some usage and then just start banning tf out of them? Reverse uno
InkCanon 4mo ago
I feel obliged to point out the disingenuousness of what this post says and the post it quotes. The most egregious parts are payment fraud and reselling - these are speculated but not actually said to be known to be happening, which you have left out. 1. Claims of payment fraud. I actually clicked the BBC article linked about payments fraud it referred to. It was an article about a criminal syndicate stealing credit cards. It mentions buying cryptocurrencies, AI API purchases are not mentioned. 2. The claims that they are reselling the chats to AI labs. The post you cite is speculating it could be, but this is unverified. The claims of reselling is also bizzare. Arbitrary user prompts are low quality data. If I were an AI lab, wouldn't I just pay for the API proxy and get targeted output for far less? Also calling it bot accounts is a stretch. Bots mimick human input. These are proxy accounts.
- tristanj 4mo ago
  There's sources linked in the article https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235 https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235
Varelion 4mo ago
Capitalism at its finest.
ErwinsArm 4mo ago
Tysm for sharing the link
iwantcheats 4mo ago
This will get you some free tokens in that site: https://yunwu.ai/register?aff=eyPD https://yunwu.ai/register?aff=eyPD
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

epsteingpt 4mo ago

How are they 'streaming' the responses and 'pooling' the tokens? Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?

bagels 4mo ago
They probably asked claude how to do it.
paxys 4mo ago
Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.
- walrus01 4mo ago
  Not going to work for very long or at any scale coming from datacenter/hosting provider IPs. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of how they snowshoe the traffic.
  - paxys 4mo ago
    As long as you stick to a single unique IP per account it isn't going to get flagged.
    - walrus01 4mo ago
      Respectfully, no, that's not how it works. You think the people running anti-fraud and anti-bot measures don't have tools that know the specific ipv4 and ipv6 CIDR ranges of every ASN that they categorize as hosting/colo providers? And that's just as a basic first effort reject measure to prevent automation tools from using things designed for human-interactive use only. Go try to do many of these things from Cogent IP space and see how long your project lasts.
      - awakeasleep 4mo ago
        Sorry for being a newb here but are you saying Anthropic blocks people from running claude code on datacenter ip ranges? Or is the datacenter IP just one part of the picture?
      - elwebmaster 4mo ago
        Nonsense. Many if not all legit Claude users are using Claude Code inside their Cloud servers. How else would you use it anyway? For just local dev? That's so 2000 and late bro.
        walrus01 4mo ago
        No, I'm not saying it's the exclusive and only measure (that would indeed be something we might see 20, 25 years ago), it's one of a myriad of discrete datapoints used to determine if an account is authentic or not. There's a lot of inauthentic coordinated automated systems these days along the general lines of scraping/crawling/social media manipulation/sockpuppetry that require running through residential proxies or proxies to places that don't look like datacenter IP space.
teravor 4mo ago
> Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China? why would anyone do that? you do realize the laptop farm case was work computers? the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
- globalnode 4mo ago
  that explains why theyre blocking me. i have privacy controls up high and they must think im a chinese residential proxy bot
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tristanj 4mo ago
The resellers route requests via one of thousands of Claude Max 5x accounts. When an account reaches its usage limit, they automatically switch to another account.
- kristofferR 4mo ago
  Why would they use Max 5x instead of Max 20x, which is cheaper relatively speaking?
  - tristanj 4mo ago
    You're right, they're using the $200 Max plan, which I thought was the 5x plan. It's talked about in the article I linked.
  - dannyw 4mo ago
    Don’t trust my experiences as fact since it’s a bit opaque, but I believe 20x only offers 4x the 5hr session limits. The weekly limit is still 2x, which is the same as the price increase.
chews 4mo ago
ask your gpt how does openrouter work, then ask, how do proxies work.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

Thats pretty crazy. This kind of thing jeopardizes Claude Max.

avaer 4mo ago
If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.
- gruez 4mo ago
  But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.
  - TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
    There's still per-window and weekly limits though, so it's not really like that.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      Office 365 is licensed per seat/account, but each account has a 5 device limit. Do you think it's fair game for an enterprising person to sub license each account to 5 people, 1 device each?
      - TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
        I wouldn't do it personally for the same reason I wouldn't share my toothbrush with 5 people.
  - wslh 4mo ago
    You can write whatever contract you like, the problem is how to enforce it, and a greater problem is enforcing it around the world.

fwipsy 4mo ago

Hm! In this context, introducing ID verification may have been a significant silver lining to the order to take down Fable for Anthropic. This also sheds a very different light on people saying that competitive open-source models are undermining frontier labs' business model.

Chu4eeno 4mo ago
The chinese have already worked around the ID verification, by recruiting people in low-income countries to complete the checks for less than 30 USD per account (so much for Altman's Worldcoin). https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-market-sells-claude-102000667.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-marke...

gruez 4mo ago

>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs. >Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.

weird-eye-issue 4mo ago
You can use it as an API unlike the subscription.
spindump8930 4mo ago
> Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.
- Mr_Xpes 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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tristanj 4mo ago
It's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass. There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.
- 4mo ago

xgstation 4mo ago

> This is one reason why Deepseek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. This one does not make sense to me at all. Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.

tristanj 4mo ago
DeepSeek permanently cut its V4-pro API prices by 75% because they were too expensive. Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens. Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.
- ammo1662 4mo ago
  China also have trust issue with American companies. Most of State-owned companies will not use those services even if they can directly access them.
  - nekusar 4mo ago
    And? The US feds wont allow even local Qwen or Deepseek models either. "Evul godless commies" or some such nonsense.
- ffsm8 4mo ago
  Urm, no? I man they did cut prices by 75% that part is true - but they reduced a starting price that was below sonnet. Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.
  - furyofantares 4mo ago
    Is there a contradiction here? If resold Opus tokens are sold at a 93% discount, you can be a lot cheaper than Sonnet while also a lot more expensive than resold Opus tokens.

rconti 4mo ago

Wait, so is your theory mutually exclusive to Anthropic's claims of "theft of capabilities"?

Chu4eeno 4mo ago
No, this reseller 中转站 thing is basically a loss leader for certain chinese ai labs to distill claude with verified human input.
- chinathrow 4mo ago
  How do you gain insights such as this?
tristanj 4mo ago
Not really. I think Anthropic focuses on identifiable distillation attacks rather than the (even larger) industrial-scale token harvesting and reselling operation, because they don’t want people to know how easy it is to get cheap Claude tokens. Once people realize they can access Anthropic models at a 90% discount, they won’t want to pay full API prices anymore.
bandrami 4mo ago
No, it's part of the capability theft. They resell Claude tokens cheaply and then simultaneously log everything for distillation. Even if they take a small loss on the token sales it's much cheaper than the equivalent compute.

HeavenFox 4mo ago

Also just plain old fraud: selling Chinese models as Opus. With the capabilities of Chinese models catching up fast, this is getting more and more difficult to detect.

avsteele 4mo ago

What does this have to do with Alibaba? Are you saying Alibaba is the reseller? If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.

lokar 4mo ago
They buy the logs from the bot farmers
- maxnevermind 4mo ago
  Are logs somehow used for the purpose of training their own models or something else?
  - floam 4mo ago
    Distillation from having enough logs

dwa3592 4mo ago

>>Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. Can someone with more understanding dumb it down for me please. Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price???? why would XYZ offer this at a loss like that when they could just offer it at Anthropic's price??? The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".

hoten 4mo ago
Because Anthropic's subscriptions come with X amount of tokens / week, and divided by the subscription cost it is WAY less than what they charge per-token (the "API price") beyond that. So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.
VladVladikoff 4mo ago
They probably buy the plans instead of the API tokens, and resell access via a custom API that routes to the plans. So you presumably get cheaper access this way than paying API pricing.
Chu4eeno 4mo ago
> Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price???? Yes, as they explained they do it through things like pooling accounts, straight up payment fraud, and double-dipping by selling the logs of the conversations to chinese AI labs so that they can train their own models on it. > The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6". There might be some that try this, but they would get caught very quickly, there's still a moat between Claude and Deepseek, even in casual use. Look up Zilan Qian's reporting if you want more detail.
- neves 4mo ago

operatingthetan 4mo ago

This story reads like a William Gibson novel. Wild times.

alexnewman 4mo ago

But I can rebuild glm Using open source methods…

Chu4eeno 4mo ago
And there are a ton of Claude conversation logs (with CoT/inference) with no clear provenance circulating freely on huggingface, guess where they (likely) come from.
- yoavm 4mo ago
  Wouldn't all of them be in Mandarin according to this theory? Are they?

golergka 4mo ago

Needless to say, they also collect all the data and sell it to labs which want to distill the models they’re serving.

tamimio 4mo ago

Im ok with this! Is there a site that list all these resellers, or better, a openrouter-like for these resellers?

tristanj 4mo ago
They're called 中转站 (transfer stations/proxies). They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. I linked a larger operator in the parent comment, or have a look at https://hvoy.ai/ https://hvoy.ai/ which lists a ton. You can also find many on Funpay, which may be easier to use. This is one seller I found, they're reselling "real Max 20x subscription accounts", at ~97% below official API prices https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310 https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310 Note that whoever you buy from will be able to read all your tokens, so don’t use it for anything confidential/financial.
- ValentineC 4mo ago
  > They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. Random, but are the frontier AI providers like ChatGPT better at searching the Chinese internet now? When I was in China a few months ago and asking AI for restaurant recommendations, all the US frontier providers were pretty useless, or plain out hallucinating, even if I specifically ask them to search Dianping (Yelp for China).
  - tristanj 4mo ago
    I'm not sure. I use Grok for most of my esoteric searches and it does quite well. I explicitly prompt it to search in the language most relevant to that query, and found it does quite well. I also tell it to respond back in English. Often, there is not enough information available in English about nice regional topics. I know ChatGPT had an issue where it only tried to search in English (unless prompted) and the answers were not great.
- nkzd 4mo ago
  How did you even find these? Even in discussions about cheap AI I've never seen anyone mention this. Great find!

areoform 4mo ago

Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to. Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way. I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility. Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless. So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function, f(text) -> (text_transform) where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/language_models_are_implicitly_continuous.pdf https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag... According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function. Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product. I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process; Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm. Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered) You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google. You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians. It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out. And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos." Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please." Just saying.

irlib 4mo ago

Where are you getting cheap GLM5.2? It is about 1/3 the price of Opus, which is not what I would call cheap.

spoaceman7777 4mo ago
Depending on the provider, GLM-5.2 is between 4.5-5x cheaper than Opus. You can compare prices/speed/etc. for basically all relevant models on aa https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers
tw1984 4mo ago
a company can just download GLM 5.2 and start self hosting this model using the chip designed and made by itself. That could lower the cost by 20-30x. for hobbyist buying a few Mac Studio to host GLM 5.2 at home, the cost might 10x more than just using Opus API.
zoexiong 4mo ago
Hugging Face plus Z.ai API makes sense to me. Due to creators get paid, they can keep building better models, and the local-running community benefits from that over time. AIhubmix currently is the cheapest rather than openrouter.

abofh 4mo ago

Somebody figured out how to make the trial profitable! I don't really feel bad about anyone here, they were subsidizing to get people hooked, someone turned the subsidies into profit when they got selective pricing mode enabled, it was always going to be arbitrage. But the winner is the guy in the middle in a jurisdiction that will likely be judgement proof, because everything they capture, both input and out, and if available, thinking tokens -- are gonna be for sale as soon as you cut off their other revenue. Zero knowledge was a commitment Anthropic took seriously, until it got inconvenient. So, people reselling their leftover plan crumbs? Probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's civil, and I wish Anthropics lawyers actually closing Streisand's LLM

junofan 4mo ago
I don’t follow your reasoning. It is foreign to me. You talk about winners, but this is clearly fraud.
- akersten 4mo ago
  Fraud? Anthropic sells some undisclosed and ever-changing number of tokens for $200, the customer uses those tokens. If there's any fraud here, it's that the $200 next month is silently worth fewer tokens than the last.
- gosub100 4mo ago
  Won't you think of the poor, POOR AI companies!

yokisan 4mo ago

One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright: - Purchase multiple accounts via resellers - Send messages that contain a UID - Capture these in Anthropic's logs - Shut down account. Use any metadata to identify related accounts /loop

akersten 4mo ago
This, just like blanking out a football stream for a split second to binary search and find IPTV rebroadcasters, is far too good a solution. Suits prefer to make it seem like their job of fighting "misuse" is hard, justify their budget, continued existence of the trust & safety department, face scans, etc.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
NetOpWibby 4mo ago
They could be doing this internally and want to see if they can downright eliminate these loopholes before bringing Fable back. I don't care how they do it, I just want to use Fable again.
killingtime74 4mo ago
Maybe Fable is not as capable as thought? On the one hand they talk it up as world ending and on the other hand they can't manage bot accounts on their own service. I want to hear how this can be rationalised. From the article "every layer of control frontier US AI companies have added (geoblocking, phone verification, credit card requirements, and now live biometric KYC checks) has produced a corresponding layer of evasion infrastructure".
- suzzer99 4mo ago
  No system is foolproof. They'd have to be willing to throw out some % of good customers along with the bots. Amazon can do that because they have a monopoly already. Anthropic can't risk it when they're trying to grab market share.

charcircuit 4mo ago

Why aren't these on openrouter?

tristanj 4mo ago
Probably because Openrouter is a US based company, and they don't want to be sued by Anthropic/OpenAI.
SXX 4mo ago
Obviously because you cant join open router and start serving OpenAI / Anthropic models.

icfly2 4mo ago

[flagged]

8note 4mo ago
i still want those data sets to become public domain. open weights still isnt good enough
- bendews 4mo ago
  That's the conundrum isn't it? Anyone that posts their datasets would be immediately sued/blocked/boycotted to oblivion due to the obvious and blatant data theft, not to mention IP and copyright issues.
  - timschmidt 4mo ago
    Nvidia's even being sued for providing scripts which automate the downloading of said data from non-Nvidia sources. We certainly don't need copyrights that last nearly a century after the author's death (they literally cannot help the author), so here's hoping that some of the disputes over all this money changing hands can reign in some of the existing copyright sprawl. A stronger public domain would provide more useful training data for everyone, including open source models, and make criminals out of fewer AI researchers.
anileated 4mo ago
The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. I would not say PRC making LLMs cheaper is the best outcome (though it is better than nothing). The best outcome would be to make the practice of training on our data without consent illegal, which would simultaneously slow down economic change and make it more organic as well as give PRC companies less capabilities to extract.
- overfeed 4mo ago
  > The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. There is no IP theft because LLM outputs aren't protected, just egregious ToS violations.

jnaina 4mo ago

no honor among thieves.

overfeed 4mo ago

> which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots. Lol. The irony is thick for anyone who ever had to attempt defense against an onslaught of American AI lab crawlers that ignore robots.txt

a34729t 4mo ago
Yeah nobody is gonna be shedding any tears for them

temporaryacc2 4mo ago

Thank you for your very informative comment! (It's a shame almost all replies are just the same contrived pessisism found on every Anthropic thread on HN).

eloisius 4mo ago
Indeed! It’s so hard to find reasonable takes on AI that aren’t littered with accounts created 11 days ago that only post in threads related to Anthropic for some reason
- deleted 4mo ago
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- ErwinsArm 4mo ago
  the bots are strong in the ai space lmao

Lio 4mo ago

I’m surprised that instead of cutting them off Anthropic doesn’t just switch them to a lower quality, cheaper to models. That would seem more effective than simply shutting down the accounts. Keep them paying for junk.

eloisius 4mo ago
That sounds like it would actually be fraud.
- LoganDark 4mo ago
  Not if you simply say in the terms of service that it's allowed. Then suddenly it's normal (every company does this). Similarly to how the terms of service can simply say you're not allowed to sue.
  - wqaatwt 4mo ago
    > how the terms of service can simply say you're not allowed to sue. That doesn’t necessarily mean much. You can put plenty of outrageous statements into any contract that automatically doesn’t make them binding.
  - gf000 4mo ago
    It's maybe how it works in the US, but that sure as hell not how it works in the EU (my snark wants to continue as "or any sane legislature")
    - LoganDark 4mo ago
      Anthropic is based in the US. Unfortunately, too late to edit my comment to say "US company"
- Lio 4mo ago
  That's an interesting point but I'd ask who would Anthropic be defrauding? The Chinese resellers that are happily operating outside of the terms of service? Or the reseller's customers, that are knowingly buying a potentially fake service? Or Alibaba, also using resellers to break terms of service with the aim of attacking Anthropic's business? INAL but I think Anthropic would be able to argue an "unclean hands defence" to prove they are not defrauding anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_hands_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_hands_doctrine In short, you can't knowingly break a contract and then complain that someone else is not treating you fairly with regard to that same contract.

maxloh 4mo ago

> They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. Claude never provides the raw reasoning chain. What you see is just a summary of that reasoning. Getting the full thinking output requires an enterprise agreement. https://patrickmccanna.net/the-text-in-claude-codes-extended-thinking-output-is-not-authentic/ https://patrickmccanna.net/the-text-in-claude-codes-extended...

tancop 4mo ago
how hard is it to find a manager or ops team member at one of the enterprise companies and buy lets say 100gb of logs? the chinese lab can promise to anonymize the data before training, not release it raw and pay a good price. honestly you might just need to get data from a couple long sessions and feed it back to another model as an example to make synthetic reasoning chains. if the emulator model is good enough it should work.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  I would expect that to be very hard

alliao 4mo ago

don't buy your drugs from shady operators children! always get it from the source

ycui7 4mo ago

Those resellers are simply just selling Kimi K2.5 or GLM5.1 as counterfeit Opus. We, Chinese, know how to play the counterfeit game for a long time in so many industry.

osti 4mo ago
That's not true, some of them are indeed fake, but a lot of them are actually providing real opus at low cost doing what op said.
- petesergeant 4mo ago
  Genuinely, can you provide a better source here than "trust me bro"?
  - osti 4mo ago
    I read quite a few posts about this on RedNote.
- theli0nheart 4mo ago
  I just tested the provider that the OP mentioned extensively yesterday, and the models they're selling are definitely not from Anthropic. The voice "sounds" like Sonnet or Opus at first glance, but the intelligence is definitely not there.

bg24 4mo ago

Great point, and this is on the vendor (Anthropic) to address. Typical fraud issue. OP is about modeling distilling the capabilities.

blitzar 4mo ago

> Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices How dare they. Only Anthropic is allowed to sell its tokens at 70-90% below the API prices.

nicce 4mo ago

> These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots. Don’t put that on Chinese.

eru 4mo ago

> This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. Sounds a bit circular? Aren't the companies working on these models than also the ones that are paying the subsidy (via paying for training data)?

arkh 4mo ago

It's fucking laughable to see people complain about what they did and still do. Using illicitly extracted data? That's all main LLM playbook. Onslaught of bots? Ask where the bots almost DOSing most internet sites for the last couple years come from. As some people would say: Cheh

smashah 4mo ago

Amazing thank you chinese resellers. This is a perfect way to undermine The Great Satan's Genocide Machine's chosen model comapnies.

mellosouls 4mo ago

Interesting article - your discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48165492

ilangge 4mo ago

This may be the truth behind the alleged distillation incident.

petesergeant 4mo ago

> payments fraud One of these things is not like the others... If Anthropic could show that Chinese commercial competitors were using payments fraud to do this, they would be shouting it from the rooftops.

bryceneal 4mo ago

I have 0 sympathy for Anthropic. Their latest models are extremely censored. The Fable rollout was horrible. Their Cyber Access program criteria denies doxxed Americans doing legitimate security work. Anthropic is hostile to their users and hostile to their own country. OpenAI is considerably better on all of these fronts, but still not perfect. I'm happy to use and support Chinese model developers if it means less censorship and gatekeeping. I have absolutely no dog in this fight, and neither do most American developers. We will use whatever is cheaper and better. Game on.

tristanj 4mo ago
Chinese models are the exact opposite of what you claim to want, they are all highly censored, even more so than Anthropic models, with government mandated censorship.
- bryceneal 4mo ago
  Your take does not reflect the reality on the ground. The Chinese models are censored on a narrow range of political topics which have nothing to do with my work. The weights are open and they can be uncensored/abliterated with little effort.
- deaton 4mo ago
  Open-weight models can be abliterated automatically with open source tools though and completely decensored. You can't do that with a closed cloud model.

sorenjan 4mo ago

I think companies should do this too, in a smaller scale. Proxy all LLM traffic to and from your employees, and use it to fine tune a smaller local model.

whywhywhywhy 4mo ago

Considering how Claude and GPT were trained selling this as training data is completely justified.

LastTrain 4mo ago

Good for them!

windexh8er 4mo ago

Even if what you say is the truth (I don't think that is what's actually happening) it sounds to me like fair play capitalism working as intended! I guess when you rip off the entire Internet and then turn around and complain about getting ripped off nobody cares or feels for you. If there's a master class in getting the entire world to hate you then both Sam and Dario will be the prime examples.

samuelknight 4mo ago

I didn't connect the reseller pricing to DS and GLM prices until you explained it. Very good observation. Deepseek v4 pro in particular is priced so low that it's hard to imagine that they have any margin. 0.76/1.52 for a 1.6T param model leaves very little margin. Even the domestic providers on Openrouter are multiples of the price https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro

jwang987 4mo ago

they even resell GPT codex usage at 1~5% API costs. OpenAI has 1-month free trial promo in some regions, and they harvest free accounts in a large scale. I have a wechat contact that offers 98% off for GPT 5.5 and he's still profitable

throwawayffffas 4mo ago

> Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices That is not what they are claiming, not in this article at least. It's the distillation they are complaining about.

4d4m 4mo ago

Thanks. This is a widely misunderstood part of the market that the frontier companies are either unaware of, or don't see as a threat. Consumers are flocking to this, its better than dealing with their limits, changes, and opaque pricing. Funny enough, frontier companies are literally training their users to seek alternatives, local models, and distilled models to meet their throughput needs.

DrewADesign 4mo ago
It’s not that they don’t understand that it’s a problem, it’s just that the easy way to address it is with reduced, flat-rate pricing… but they are already losing gobs of cash on their regular users. Their business model, as it stands, is not sustainable. That’s not saying they won’t find a stable one, but the one they have now is definitely not. The external cash is drying up, and they need to figure out a way to shed the low-revenue users, and charge the remaining users a lot more or they’re going to go under. They would probably do a goddamned backflip if every flat rate user that wasn’t willing to switch to API pricing went local, or even better, went with a competitor.

pseudohadamard 4mo ago

"How dare someone rip off the stuff that we've stolen!".

dilyevsky 4mo ago

Why cant anthropic just sign up to those resellers, rack up some usage and then just start banning tf out of them? Reverse uno

InkCanon 4mo ago

I feel obliged to point out the disingenuousness of what this post says and the post it quotes. The most egregious parts are payment fraud and reselling - these are speculated but not actually said to be known to be happening, which you have left out. 1. Claims of payment fraud. I actually clicked the BBC article linked about payments fraud it referred to. It was an article about a criminal syndicate stealing credit cards. It mentions buying cryptocurrencies, AI API purchases are not mentioned. 2. The claims that they are reselling the chats to AI labs. The post you cite is speculating it could be, but this is unverified. The claims of reselling is also bizzare. Arbitrary user prompts are low quality data. If I were an AI lab, wouldn't I just pay for the API proxy and get targeted output for far less? Also calling it bot accounts is a stretch. Bots mimick human input. These are proxy accounts.

tristanj 4mo ago
There's sources linked in the article https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235 https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235

Varelion 4mo ago

Capitalism at its finest.

ErwinsArm 4mo ago

Tysm for sharing the link

iwantcheats 4mo ago

This will get you some free tokens in that site: https://yunwu.ai/register?aff=eyPD https://yunwu.ai/register?aff=eyPD

deleted 4mo ago

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