A sprawling grey market for Claude AI tokens has emerged in China, where unofficial resellers are reportedly offering access to Anthropic's flagship models at discounts of up to 93% below official API prices.
The claims, raised in a widely discussed Hacker News forum thread and supported by a detailed analysis from researcher Zilan Qian, suggest the underground ecosystem extends far beyond simple account sharing, relying instead on a sophisticated network of proxy operators, account suppliers, and, in some cases, alleged data harvesting.
