Comment by tristanj

DeepSeek permanently cut its V4-pro API prices by 75% because they were too expensive. Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens.

Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.

It's somewhat difficult to have any sympathy for Anthropic here. They're entirely responsible for selling tokens at below cost, with the age-old bait-and-switch tactic.

If they weren't doing so, then these Chinese resellers wouldn't be viable. Radical idea, but how about they actually charge a viable price, even on subscription plans?

If resold Anthropic tokens undercut even the at-cost open-weight model tokens, because they're reselling subsidized subscription tokens, then you'd have to start selling open-weight model tokens at a loss in order to match them.

Also, wouldn't that claim only hold in China?

I'm an European and I'm not using those proxys the article describes.

It's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass.

There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.

> Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China

So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.

You can use it as an API unlike the subscription.

Maybe these resellers are using stolen American credit card numbers? Reselling Claude access seems to be a nice way to launder the money.

China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop).

This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.

However, I don't really mind China "stealing" from Anthropic. For us consumers we are getting the cake and eating it too. I.e we are getting rapid improvement to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in funding, yet the market remains big enough that there's a chance of it not ending up as a monopoly in 20 years. And venture capital are footing the bill. A part of their investment is practically being redirected to fund Chinese AI development. It lets us live out our lives as happy CAC farmers[1].

So I would argue its not as much of a "cheaper solution" as it is intentionally and maliciously abusing another company's product to extract more value than the billing plans intend (given an average user), and further subsidizing the product by selling this data to competitors. But I don't necessarily think its a bad thing for us end-users. Nor for the market. But it is bad for Anthropic and its investors.

[1]: https://phrack.org/issues/71/17

>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.

Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814

I get the vague impression that this was written in a sarcastic way, but it has a straightforwardly true literal read because yes, this is what the free market is about and Anthropic will have to compete with the Chinese if they want a big share of the market. Chinese models are cheap and good; even without reselling Anthropic's services they're competitive. Which reading did you intend?

And, gotta say, the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious. There might be an economic study here somewhere about just how anti-consumer and anti-progress their IP laws turned out to be. We've got an entire postindustrial revolution centred around who can ignore the most stupid laws.

> Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

When it comes to favorite companies of the tech communities, it's almost always "Rules for thee, but not for me"

The standard stance is "they can do no wrong and they are absolutely perfect". I mean, look at any thread with anything about Apple in it.

> what economics told me the free market was all about.

Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.

It never did.

In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.

AI was always going to be a race to the bottom and low margins. It’s why I’m extremely bearish on AI as an investment. It’s framed as some high margin business when it’s really going to end up like your toilet paper at Costco. You will use whatever is cheapest and gets the job done.

Free markets work when paired with property laws that can be enforced if broken. If China could offer a cheaper solution in that framework, it would be as you say.

If you continue studying econ you will learn about the various failure modes of free markets including the free rider problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.

Ah yes, systematic fraud and protectionist practices, free market through and through.

The "free market" gave the PRC its current strategic lock on rare-earth minerals. There's definitely no such thing as a free market in a Maoist dictatorship. I personally think the "free market" concept is an unachievable ideal and thought-terminating cliche, but "free market in a Maoist dictatorship" is for sure a contradiction in terms.

Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.

Nuance please.

They are:

1- breaking terms of conditions of the service

2- getting banned and creating thousands of accounts to break the conditions of the service at scale

3- using VPNs and proxies (possibly residential) to mask their network origin and identity

4- Using potentially fake names to sign up

5- Using different credit cards?

Fraud on so many levels, a lot of the infrastructure and modus operandi is what cybercriminals use, these are attackers man, whether you like the victim or not, and whether you think it's poetic or not, I recommend compartimentalizing and just trying to gauge whether an act is wrong or not in itself.

Do you also think Chinese selling counterfeit US postage stamps on eBay for 50% retail price (which is a major problem CBP and USPIS are fighting presently) is the free market at work?

This post is so delusional and dripping with condescension I've read it three times and I still can't figure out if you're trolling or not.

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I guess you missed the fraud part.

Maybe Fable is not as capable as thought?

On the one hand they talk it up as world ending and on the other hand they can't manage bot accounts on their own service.

I want to hear how this can be rationalised.

From the article "every layer of control frontier US AI companies have added (geoblocking, phone verification, credit card requirements, and now live biometric KYC checks) has produced a corresponding layer of evasion infrastructure".

> One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright

You're assuming Anthropic want to stop it.

I think it serves their interests more to be able to release stories like this from time to time, to feed to the US government, in an attempt to get the Chinese competition shut down.

This only shuts down the account you have bought in the first, plus a few others if it is shared.

> Use any metadata to identify related accounts

How does that work? I think this is the most important part to have an impact on the „thousand“ bot accounts.

They could be doing this internally and want to see if they can downright eliminate these loopholes before bringing Fable back.

I don't care how they do it, I just want to use Fable again.

This, just like blanking out a football stream for a split second to binary search and find IPTV rebroadcasters, is far too good a solution. Suits prefer to make it seem like their job of fighting "misuse" is hard, justify their budget, continued existence of the trust & safety department, face scans, etc.

That's not true, some of them are indeed fake, but a lot of them are actually providing real opus at low cost doing what op said.

I don’t follow your reasoning. It is foreign to me. You talk about winners, but this is clearly fraud.

The chinese have already worked around the ID verification, by recruiting people in low-income countries to complete the checks for less than 30 USD per account (so much for Altman's Worldcoin).

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-marke...

If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.

That is pretty crazy, almost like how Claude and all the other models are jeopardizing other businesses without paying for their training data and wiping their ass with robots.txt

No, this reseller 中转站 thing is basically a loss leader for certain chinese ai labs to distill claude with verified human input.

No, it's part of the capability theft. They resell Claude tokens cheaply and then simultaneously log everything for distillation. Even if they take a small loss on the token sales it's much cheaper than the equivalent compute.

Not really. I think Anthropic focuses on identifiable distillation attacks rather than the (even larger) industrial-scale token harvesting and reselling operation, because they don’t want people to know how easy it is to get cheap Claude tokens.

Once people realize they can access Anthropic models at a 90% discount, they won’t want to pay full API prices anymore.

how hard is it to find a manager or ops team member at one of the enterprise companies and buy lets say 100gb of logs? the chinese lab can promise to anonymize the data before training, not release it raw and pay a good price.

honestly you might just need to get data from a couple long sessions and feed it back to another model as an example to make synthetic reasoning chains. if the emulator model is good enough it should work.

That sounds like it would actually be fraud.

Hugging Face plus Z.ai API makes sense to me. Due to creators get paid, they can keep building better models, and the local-running community benefits from that over time.

AIhubmix currently is the cheapest rather than openrouter.

Depending on the provider, GLM-5.2 is between 4.5-5x cheaper than Opus. You can compare prices/speed/etc. for basically all relevant models on aa https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers

a company can just download GLM 5.2 and start self hosting this model using the chip designed and made by itself. That could lower the cost by 20-30x.

for hobbyist buying a few Mac Studio to host GLM 5.2 at home, the cost might 10x more than just using Opus API.

Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.

The resellers route requests via one of thousands of Claude Max 5x accounts. When an account reaches its usage limit, they automatically switch to another account.

    > Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?

why would anyone do that? you do realize the laptop farm case was work computers?

the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies

ask your gpt how does openrouter work, then ask, how do proxies work.

They probably asked claude how to do it.

They buy the logs from the bot farmers

People have estimated that a $200 Claude Max 20x subscription gets you ~$2800 worth of tokens every month if you use it continuously. So if you can find a way to resell the tokens you can offer a 90% discount and still make a profit.

> Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price????

Yes, as they explained they do it through things like pooling accounts, straight up payment fraud, and double-dipping by selling the logs of the conversations to chinese AI labs so that they can train their own models on it.

> The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".

There might be some that try this, but they would get caught very quickly, there's still a moat between Claude and Deepseek, even in casual use.

Look up Zilan Qian's reporting if you want more detail.

Because Anthropic's subscriptions come with X amount of tokens / week, and divided by the subscription cost it is WAY less than what they charge per-token (the "API price") beyond that.

So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.

They probably buy the plans instead of the API tokens, and resell access via a custom API that routes to the plans. So you presumably get cheaper access this way than paying API pricing.

It makes no sense.

These China e bashing is very annoying. It is hard to argue with people drowned in American propaganda. I'd expect better arguments from the intelligent people in HN

That's an insightful perspective and I think I largely agree. But just for fun, I wonder if that isn't an argument in favor of making the function implementation impure. Perhaps "enhancing" all queries with some sort of search result (or query of a giant db) instead of charging for an explicit tool call. Not only is it sorely needed to prevent stale data but (on the process level) it breaks the purity assumption on which the approximation theorem depends (alternatively on the function level it introduces hidden inputs).

This is why every AI company does crawl today.

Do they just reshape the function on the fly or save the process steps? Maybe it doesn't matter anymore. Even Google indexes are more and more spoiled to become representation of the function, because of the AI slop.

Genuine live data is king.

Obviously because you cant join open router and start serving OpenAI / Anthropic models.

Probably because Openrouter is a US based company, and they don't want to be sued by Anthropic/OpenAI.

They're called 中转站 (transfer stations/proxies). They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. I linked a larger operator in the parent comment, or have a look at https://hvoy.ai/ which lists a ton. You can also find many on Funpay, which may be easier to use.

This is one seller I found, they're reselling "real Max 20x subscription accounts", at ~97% below official API prices https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310

Note that whoever you buy from will be able to read all your tokens, so don’t use it for anything confidential/financial.

And there are a ton of Claude conversation logs (with CoT/inference) with no clear provenance circulating freely on huggingface, guess where they (likely) come from.

The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. I would not say PRC making LLMs cheaper is the best outcome (though it is better than nothing). The best outcome would be to make the practice of training on our data without consent illegal, which would simultaneously slow down economic change and make it more organic as well as give PRC companies less capabilities to extract.

i still want those data sets to become public domain. open weights still isnt good enough

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I hope you say the same when these cheap llms are used in drones to target humans. The world models are exactly built with that direction in mind.

Yeah nobody is gonna be shedding any tears for them

Indeed! It’s so hard to find reasonable takes on AI that aren’t littered with accounts created 11 days ago that only post in threads related to Anthropic for some reason

Chinese models are the exact opposite of what you claim to want, they are all highly censored, even more so than Anthropic models, with government mandated censorship.