China's gray market sells Claude access at up to 90 percent off

Claude is not officially available in China. It is, in practice, widely available there at roughly a tenth of list price, and the discount has a source.

What happened

Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab, documented the market in an essay for ChinaTalk. The intermediaries are called transfer stations. They are API proxy services that accept requests from Chinese users, forward them through overseas servers, and take payment in yuan through WeChat or Alipay, so a customer needs neither a foreign credit card nor a VPN.

Pricing sits 70 to 90 percent below Anthropic’s official rates, with one common benchmark quoted at 1 yuan per US dollar of API credit. The services advertise openly on GitHub, Taobao and Telegram, and community repositories rank them by price and uptime.

The economics come from several sources at once. Operators farm free credits, share subscriptions across many users, use stolen credentials, and in some cases silently substitute a cheaper model for the premium one the customer believes they are buying. They also harvest users’ prompts and outputs and resell that material as AI training data.

What it means

Export controls and geographic restrictions on frontier models are built on the assumption that the model itself is the chokepoint. A proxy layer removes that assumption. The infrastructure also degrades Anthropic’s visibility into who its end users are, which weakens the usage monitoring that safety policies depend on.

For the customer, two problems compound. There is no way to verify which model actually answered a given request, so benchmark expectations and cost calculations are both unreliable. And the prompt itself becomes a second product, sold on to a buyer the user never sees. Researchers note the same infrastructure supports model distillation and payment fraud, which places these services well outside the category of an ordinary discount reseller.