Claude's Shadow Market in China

A thriving gray market in China is reselling access to Anthropic's Claude at 70–90% below list price, even though Anthropic blocks the country. 
Resellers run "transfer stations," which are proxy services hosted overseas. 

They are supplied by mass-registered accounts and foreign phone numbers, and buyers pay in yuan through WeChat or Alipay.
 
The discounts come from farming free credits, abusing education and enterprise discounts, and splitting $200 Max plans among several users. Some resellers secretly swap in cheaper models.
 
The buyers range from students and developers to AI labs trying to "distill" Claude into their own models. 

Anthropic says DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax used more than 24,000 fake accounts to send over 16 million requests.
 
The risks go beyond lost revenue. 
 
The proxy operators can see every prompt and response, and spreading activity across many accounts weakens Anthropic's abuse detection.

Anthropic has responded with geo-blocking, payment checks and biometric ID verification. 
 
But deepfake tools are already being used to beat those checks, so this looks set to be a long contest between Anthropic and the resellers.