Chinese Gray Market Sells Anthropic AI Access at 10% of Official Price
The scale and organization of this gray market-including tens of thousands of proxy accounts and coordinated distillation campaigns-show that Anthropic's technical and policy barriers have not stopped Chinese access to its AI models.
Reporting from 1 sources: GIGAZINE.
A gray market in China uses API proxies called "中转站" to resell access to Anthropic's Claude and Claude Code at about 10% of the official price, despite Anthropic's geographic restrictions and identity verification measures. The supply chain involves account registration services, SMS verification, payment processing, and reverse engineers.
Anthropic excludes China from Claude's supported regions and has layered on restrictions including phone number matching, overseas credit card requirements, and identity verification with government-issued IDs and live selfies. In April 2026, the White House warned that Chinese organizations use "tens of thousands of proxy accounts" for industrial-scale distillation of American AI models. Anthropic reported in February 2026 that a single proxy network managed over 20,000 fraudulent accounts in a coordinated attack by Chinese research institutions.
Despite these measures, Chinese users access Claude and Claude Code through API proxies called "中转站," which sit between the developer and Anthropic's infrastructure. Users pay in RMB via WeChat Pay or Alipay at roughly a tenth of the official token price. The supply chain includes operators who register large numbers of Anthropic accounts, SMS verification services, card payment services, proxy networks, and reverse engineers tracking changes in detection logic.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.