The original headline is: "Access to Claude in China sells for 70-90% below the official API price"

Short summary

Chinese proxy services resell Claude and OpenAI API access at 70-90% below official prices using mass-produced accounts, model swapping, and data interception. Anthropic accused Alibaba-linked entities of creating 25,000 fake accounts to distill Claude models, highlighting a grey market that thrives on access restrictions. The deeper issue affects all teams: most cannot verify which model served a request, what it cost, or whether quality dropped—making production visibility and data control more important than token savings.

• •Chinese proxy services resell Western AI API access at up to 93% below official prices via stolen accounts and model swapping
• •Anthropic accused Alibaba-linked entities of mass account creation to distill Claude models
• •Most teams lack production visibility into model identity, cost, and quality—grey markets exploit this blindness

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