Chinese developers are bypassing Anthropic's access restrictions to buy Claude tokens at roughly ten percent of the official price, according to an analysis by Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab. These tokens are obtained through so-called 'transfer stations,' which are API proxies hosted outside China. Users pay in Chinese yuan via WeChat or Alipay, without needing a VPN or foreign credit card. Popular transfer stations are listed in community directories and ranked by price and availability. The gray market undermines geoblocking and weakens Anthropic's ability to monitor misuse, according to Qian.
Operators drive prices down by exploiting free credits, enterprise discounts, and splitting token quotas across multiple users. They also swap expensive models like Claude Opus 4.7 for cheaper alternatives such as Sonnet or Chinese models like Qwen. Some proxies reroute requests to these cheaper models, a practice Chinese developers call 'diluting.' Researchers at Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security found widespread model swapping among 17 API proxies, with one supposed 'Gemini-2.5' endpoint scoring just 37 percent on a medical benchmark instead of the official 83.82 percent. The token business is seen as customer acquisition, with real margins coming from monetizing usage data, according to Qian.
Qian argues that the proxy networks, which are mostly discussed as a security problem in the US, are actually part of a much broader commercial market for Claude access in China. The modular supply chain includes account brokers, SMS verification platforms, and reverse-engineering specialists, making it resilient to shutdowns. Even Anthropic's newer KYC-style identity checks, which require ID verification with a live selfie, have workarounds, including AI-generated fake IDs and deepfake technology. Real people in low-income countries are sometimes recruited for verifications in these KYC markets, Qian says.
Source: thedecoder
