China’s gray market sells Claude for 10% of the price — and safety can’t stop it
a gray market network lets chinese developers buy claude api tokens for 10% of official prices via proxies, exposing how western ai safety controls fail against modular fraud networks.
anthropic's stringent access controls, including phone checks and biometric verification, are being circumvented by chinese 'transfer station' proxies that sell claude access for roughly 10% of the official price. according to oxford china policy lab researcher zilan qian, this resilient supply chain uses ai-generated ids and deepfakes to bypass kyc, enabling model distillation and criminal fraud. this exposes a critical failure in western ai export controls, showing that restrictions can be commodified and traded rather than enforced.