>through proxies and heavily discounted token resellers
Could you explain a little more about how this works? Are you saying that the Chinese run or have backdoored something like OpenRouter?
>through proxies and heavily discounted token resellers
Could you explain a little more about how this works? Are you saying that the Chinese run or have backdoored something like OpenRouter?
Have a look at https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens... and https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698
Chinese resellers acquire hundreds of Claude Max 5x accounts and set up a custom proxy server. Customers point their ANTHROPIC_API_KEY at that proxy, and requests are routed to Anthropic through one of those hundreds of accounts. Because one $200 Claude Max 5x account gets the equivalent of ~$2000 in of API credits, these resellers can resell Anthropic tokens at a massive discount, undercutting official API prices by more than 90%.
To cut costs even further, these accounts are funded using educational discounts, startup credits, or stolen credit cards.
The resellers log all data traveling through their proxy networks, which they then resell to Chinese labs as high-quality training data for significant profit. https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235
The resellers also loan these proxy networks to Chinese labs, allowing them to can run distillation attacks on Anthropic, while blending in with regular user traffic. https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
This is a widespread tactic, there's hundreds of proxy resellers operating. Some even offer enterprise SLAs.
oh wow, an entire seedy underbelly I was unaware of. Thanks, great reply. Appreciated!