Comment by andy99
9 hours ago
What does the demand side look like? I understand why people have these tokens they want to sell, who wants to buy them?
9 hours ago
What does the demand side look like? I understand why people have these tokens they want to sell, who wants to buy them?
Chinese. There are large number of Chinese people who are dependent on the Western model because they're still ahead of the game. But they're continuously getting banned and getting super frustrated.
Especially for Claude because Anthropic is very good at identifying mainland Chinese and getting them banned in hours. There are many of them who are willing to pay more than the original rate for a stable experience.
It's very hard for them because they'll need a legit phone number and bank cards that are not issued in China, and a clean enough IP, etc. and those better match together to make sense. (Back in the day, ChatGPT required resident IPs, which made it worse, but they worry about growth more now). Obviously, they have to use a VPN to access the real Internet, and most of the IPs they can find are shared with bots and abusers.
What does it mean for a phone number, bank card, and IP to "match together to make sense"?
Like using a British SIM card like Giffgaff, a Singaporean bank card, and an American IP, speaking simplified Chinese, working in the Chinese timezone, which is often the obvious combination of Chinese users. Or using a Nigerian/Turkish App Store/Play Store, also very common.
These combinations are questionable and very easy to filter, probably with Luna/Haiku tier of models that are able to tell things might get fishy here, and it would likely escalate to heavier checks and trigger KYC or straight banning.
Those are only my guess and probably aren't how the system works, but I think these rules are fairly easy to come up with for developers who have any idea of anti-abuse. I've seen too many Chinese posts mourning their accounts and communicating that their setups there would be similar mechanisms, I would say.
In previous months, there was news that Claude Code uploading a special signal for the Chinese timezone is pretty evident. I probably got away from having serious insomnia, using PST on my computers, and exclusively speaking English with those models lol.