Chinese students and developers are reportedly accessing frontier AI models including OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude at discounts of up to 97 per cent through unofficial proxy networks, according to an Oxford China Policy Lab investigation and developer discussions circulating online.
The services are advertised across platforms such as Taobao, Xianyu, Telegram and GitHub, where vendors claim API-level access to frontier models through shared subscriptions routed via intermediary proxy infrastructure.
