China's Grey Market Sells Claude API Tokens at 70–90% Off

When Anthropic geoblocks its Claude API for mainland China, what fills the gap is not silence but a layered grey market of intermediaries. Wired reports on what that market looks like in practice, drawing on a detailed essay by Zilan Qian published in ChinaTalk: a multi-tier ecosystem of proxy services, resellers, and data brokers that is harder to close than a single access control can handle.

The intermediaries at the center of this market are known as "transfer stations": API proxy services that accept requests from Chinese users, forward them through overseas servers, and accept payment in RMB via WeChat or Alipay. Some transfer stations reportedly sell Claude tokens at 70–90% below official Anthropic prices, with one benchmark pegging the exchange at 1 RMB per US dollar of API credit. The services are openly advertised on GitHub, Taobao, and Telegram, and community repositories apparently rank them by price and uptime. The user base reportedly spans university students, professors, freelance developers, and hobbyists, not just sophisticated technical actors with specific capability targets.

The deep discounts are reportedly sustainable because token arbitrage is only part of the revenue. A secondary stream is the logging and resale of user activity: prompts, outputs, tool calls, code context, and reasoning traces can be harvested and sold as AI training data. In that arrangement, users are simultaneously paying customers and unpaid data producers, selling their private data to proxy operators in exchange for a lower price. The supply chain reportedly runs through account sellers, SMS platforms, payment channels, proxy networks, KYC services, API proxy operators, and secondary resellers, giving the market structural depth that enforcement against any single layer does not resolve.

Anthropic has escalated its countermeasures on multiple fronts. In September 2025, the company updated its policy to bar entities more than 50% owned, directly or indirectly, by companies headquartered in unsupported regions, closing a subsidiary loophole. In April 2026, it reportedly began requiring select users to verify identity with a government-issued photo ID and a live selfie.

What the reporting does not give you is scale: how much of Claude's total API traffic actually routes through transfer station proxies, and who is buying the harvested data downstream. The honest caveat is that a grey market of this kind is a predictable structural response to strong demand meeting geopolitical access restrictions, and the supply chain it has built is likely to outlast any single enforcement measure.