The Black Market for Tokens in China

A researcher from the Oxford Chinese Policy Lab wrote an article about how Chinese providers trade tokens at prices lower than official ones. Sometimes, the price for access to a model can be as low as 10% of the official rate. The question arises: how?

It turns out there are three options. Choose your favorite ☕️:

1. Mass Data Collection. Such providers gather all requests, responses, and reasoning chains – and resell them. That's how they profit.

2. Model Substitution. You are sold Opus 4.7, but in reality, they substitute it with some locally produced Qwen. Thus, the discount on a powerful model turns into profit from a cheap one.

3. Subscription Arbitrage. For example, they take Claude Max for $200 and split it among dozens of clients due to token limits per hour. Again, profit! This also includes generating numerous fake API accounts to obtain free starter credits, fake student accounts, and reselling unused quotas from others.

All geo-blocking, phone verifications, foreign card requirements, and everything else are easily bypassed by these proxies. Thus, the market has grown, and official authorities can do nothing about it.

Chinese users massively take advantage of this, as direct access without VPNs and foreign cards is closed to them. And everyone seems satisfied.