A grey-market economy of API proxies in China is reselling access to Anthropic's Claude models at as little as 10% of the official price — and for many operators, the cheap tokens are not the product at all. The real business is harvesting the prompts, responses, and reasoning chains that flow through their servers. That is the conclusion of an investigation by Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, published via ChinaTalk and now circulating widely among developers.
Key Highlights
- Proxy services known as "transfer stations" resell Claude tokens for roughly 1 RMB per 1 USD of usage — a 70 to 90 percent markdown.
- No VPN, overseas credit card, or Anthropic account is required; users pay in RMB through WeChat or Alipay.
- Operators monetize in three ways: access markup, model substitution, and large-scale data harvesting.
- Anthropic's geoblocking, phone verification, overseas-card mandates, and live biometric KYC checks are all being circumvented.
How the Transfer Stations Work
A "transfer station" (中转站) sits between the user and Anthropic's servers. You send a request, the proxy forwards it as though it originated from an approved location, and the response comes back — no Anthropic account needed. These services are advertised openly on GitHub, Taobao, and Telegram, and are even ranked by price and uptime in community repositories.
Qian frames the economics as "one fish, three meals." The first meal is the access markup itself: operators bulk-register accounts to farm Anthropic's free API credits, subdivide a single 200-dollar Max plan across dozens of users (a practice nicknamed "APImaxxing"), and create accounts using stolen credit card details.
The Hidden Costs
The second meal is model substitution. Some proxies quietly route requests to cheaper models while advertising the flagship. German security researchers found one "Gemini-2.5" proxy scored just 37 percent accuracy on a benchmark versus 83.82 percent for the official model. Operators can also break cache continuity to force users into paying full-price token consumption.
The third meal — and according to several developers Qian interviewed, the actual point — is data harvesting. Every prompt and response is logged: for coding agents, that means complete reasoning chains, repository context, and human-verified outputs. This material feeds supervised fine-tuning and distillation pipelines, and Claude Opus reasoning datasets of unclear origin are already circulating on HuggingFace.
"Users are simultaneously paying customers and unpaid data producers," Qian writes, "selling their private data to proxy operators in exchange for a low price."
Why Anthropic's Defenses Fall Short
Anthropic rolled out geoblocking, phone verification, overseas-card requirements, and live biometric KYC checks in April 2026. The grey market routes around all of them: SMS verification farms, AI-generated fake IDs and deepfakes, and the recruitment of real people in lower-income regions to clear photo-ID and selfie checks — echoing the Worldcoin precedent in which iris scans changed hands for under 30 dollars. Anthropic's Clio monitoring system can flag cross-account patterns but cannot see through a proxy, and banned accounts are replaceable within hours.
The Bigger Picture
The scale is significant. Anthropic disclosed roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts linked to Chinese AI labs in February, and in late April the White House alleged "industrial-scale" distillation campaigns using tens of thousands of proxy accounts, naming DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax among the implicated parties.
For teams across the MENA region, the lesson is less about geopolitics than data sovereignty. A token price that looks too good to be true usually is: the savings are subsidized by the prompts, source code, and proprietary context you hand over. For any production workload — and especially anything touching customer or regulated data — legitimate, contractual access remains the only defensible path.
What's Next
Expect Anthropic and its peers to escalate behavioral detection beyond the account layer, and for the proxy ecosystem to keep adapting. The deeper question Qian raises is structural: as long as frontier intelligence is priced far above what large parts of the world can pay, grey markets will keep filling the gap — at a cost paid in data, not dollars.
Source: ChinaTalk — How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China, by Zilan Qian