Here's what is happening:
Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing them to operate below cost.
Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China. You need to use a VPN to access either, and you can't pay with a Chinese bank card. So most people who want access to Claude buy access via a reseller. It's the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China.
These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots.
Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 at a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?provider=Anthropic
This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.
I shared this story a few months back, but it never got any traction. It explains the token resale economy in China, it's an excellent read https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
This is a bit ironic, Anthropic complaining about a competitor using claude data to build its own product when Anthropic basically used all of human knowledge production to build claude, i don't think they paid every magazine, author, journalist, etc ...
This is almost standard practice in any competitive industry anyways. Disassemble your competitor's product, study it and try to reproduce / improve.
Yea I’ll never have any sympathy for this claim given that Claude is built on theft
It's a claude eat claude world out there
Anthropic did pay $1.5B to authors. But yes, it would be much better if they paid everyone on the internet dividends from every Claude chat. Or released Claude as an open model.
In practice, the former isn't very realistic, while the latter is politically dead as this is becoming a national security issue.
Anthropic was forced to pay some people they stole content from, there was no attempt at getting permission ahead of time.
And paying basically everyone online is more or less a solved problem, it's what ad agencies have to do every day.
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Yup, it's hard to take seriously any complaint about "stealing" Anthropic's services, when their entire business is based on massive theft.
The US labs do seem to have announced a lot of licensing deals though, and are buying things today due to the previous lawsuits.
At what point will we be better to support a lab that pays (some) licenses today vs the ones that pay none?
Some of the deals are in the hundreds of millions, so I suspect licensing is over a billion today? (Pure guess). That might become a big disadvantage in a price (or content) war.
I haven't seen any money, have you? Until they pay everyone or release weights theres really no change. Also they're doing this after they've already stolen. Not negotiated before
I know (via probing these models) that some of my work is in the training data. My mailbox is open.
> At what point will we be better to support a lab that pays (some) licenses today vs the ones that pay none?
Why is a lab that pays all licenses today not on your list? Is ethics and morality that low on your radar?
You should. Companies like this will inevitably try and pull the ladder up behind them.
You mean Anthropic and OpenAI, right?
All major AI companies. And any other high value industry which can be locked off (via tax brakes, patients etc)
Ironically, it's likely that the only reason USG let them get away with this — instead of making obvious and necessary adjustments to copyright law — was so that the industry would remain competitive with China.
Given that the most recent time Anthropic attempted regulatory capture, the US government responded by saying "alright, we agree that Mythos is too dangerous to release, so we've banned you from releasing Mythos," I can't wait to see what the outcome of this next push is.
Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system.
"you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"
Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
I think you meant a quote attributed to Bill Gates:
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Yes, I think the Gates quote was a response to repeated and aggressive complaints originating from Jobs (to anyone who would listen) that he had been ripped off.
I don't know if that's a real quote from Gates, but I do know it was in Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Neat, so the scene in the movie was pretty close to reality then!
Apple gave Xerox the right to buy $1 million of pre-IPO stock before the meeting took place.
Glad you pointed this out. I believe the sequence was that Jobs himself got a shorter demo during his first visit with no prior arrangements. He then negotiated bringing back a group of his key people to get a more in depth demo and that included the stock deal.
When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83).
I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.
Lisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale.
For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510
“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!”
Perhaps an arrangement can be reached?
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The websites, music, movies, books, photos, art that they stole didn't appear out of thin air. The amount of time and effort people have collectively poured into creating these works throughout history far, far surpasses Anthropic's own effort of converting them into model weights.
The equivocation is crawling website <-> crawling LLM responses.
Both Anthropic and Alibaba are trying to build bleeding edge LLMs. That part is the same. The way they source their data is slightly different, but they would both argue it constitutes fair use under Copyright law.
"Your extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine is ripping off my extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine"
Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.
So why was there crawling in 1998 but no LLMs?
Google didn't really invent much, they just had access to an insane amount of data and compute to try to train a model with just the attention mechanism, but ripping out (most of) the rest, from an earlier paper on machine translation from some poor academics, and it turned out to work very well (though insanely training data and compute intensive).
Or a feasible/economical way to attempt to store the sum total of human written output, multi-petabytes of data (outside of the resources of the NSA, maybe), when a server with 6 x 36GB 10K RPM SCSI HDD in RAID-5 was high end, and its network uplink would be at most two ports of 1 gigabit ethernet.
what kind of completely retarded non sequitur is this?
It's not really equivocation in this instance. This feels like a 'bad faith' comment. We can do better.
LLM's literally wouldn't work without the sum total of knowledge (in the forms of books and other copyrighted content) being used as 'training data' for these LLMs.
The 'bleeding edge' LLMs required many things, but: 1 Tech innovation ('attention') 2 Lots of compute 3 Data 4 Pre + post training
#4 doesn't happen without #3.
It's pretty obvious at this point that the major providers have stolen vast amounts of #3 - they have paid nearly 0 of the creators.
We can argue about the impact (I'd lean net good) vs. the cost. But arguing there isn't a cost is a bit silly.
The tech is Google's invention, popularized by OpenAI, so Anthropic should still stfu in that case.
All of this supports the fact that models arent essentially just web crawling
Sure, but alibaba is still building an LLM. The scraping of responses and the scraping of websites occupy the same location in the stack of each. It's very comparable.
There's two basic kinds of distillation: 1) the massive [and dumb] method where you ask a question and use the answer as reinforcement (Black Box), and 2) more targeted distillation where you use one model to directly inform/train/guide another model (RLAIF).
The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainly what the Chinese labs are doing, since it has a much better effect on the end result than just getting simple answers to simple questions.
These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is, because they want the USG to block/ban Chinese model providers as protectionism. They have already called for more export controls on chips (which is funny because DeepSeek v4 was designed to run on Huawei chips and now the other Chinese providers are following suit). But they can't come right out and say that, so their claim is that they're asking for more export controls because distilled models might not be as safe as their own. But if you show them a jailbreak of their model that bypasses their safety, they'll tell you that any model can eventually be jailbroken so don't worry about safety.
Yeah I think the technical term is something more like “pseudo-labeling”. The OG distillation requires logits which Anthropic doesn’t provide.
If you’re doing evals, you’re basically doing RLAIF without training a model; just looking at the results.
Fundamentally it is very difficult to stop this while still making your AI models useful.
>The strike by Alibaba is described as a "distillation" effort, which Anthropic has said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.
Claude used TB of content without permission to train their model and it was ok for them. Now someone else uses the output of a Claude model to train model and they cry foul.
The whole investment/valuation model of AI companies is based on "winner takes all", aka a monopoly. This nescessitates regulatory capture and lawfare.
Anthropic has been advocating openly for pulling up the drawbridge, ending competition and ending progress.
They will continue to lobby for restricting your access. If the Mythos/Fable restrictions would have come in after their IPO, they would have danced with joy aa this defacto has them achieve their goal after unloading the mountain of debt from the institutional onto the retail investor.
As it stands, they are set up to be aquired by Google, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX or Microsoft or any other 3 letter agency good boy for cheap.
The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "stealing U.S. AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale" is hilarious.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying foul for another entity doing exactly what they all did?
Hilarious.
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.
> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:
If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are
shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids,
potable water, sewage services, fire departments,
and police departments?
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there's no honor among thieves.
I'm looking forward to the trial where Anthropic will have to disclose sources of their training data, and then explain why they are entitled to charging customers for using regurgitated training data but Alibaba which trains their models on Anthropic's models are not.
Should be fun.
Edit: clarification
They already did and paid 1.5B https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
Quite amusing that the library of libgen is worth 1.5bil for unlimited access.
It's about the same valuation as bun, lol.
That's a great cost-benefit ratio. Can you and I steal and do illegal things and pay the same cost?
Meta/Facebook got away with it though right?
Being logically consistent isn’t as profitable as being aggressive and loud.
While I love the sentiment, I feel like the odds of this actually ever reaching a trial are low, given the international positioning of the parties, and the... um... complex relationships involved.
Anthropic's actions seem performative. Others have already speculated on the likely audience(s).
> While I love the sentiment, I feel like the odds of this actually ever reaching a trial are low ...
As cited in a peer comment here[0]:
In June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District
Court for the Northern District of California ruled on
summary judgment that using books without permission to
train AI was fair use if they were acquired legally, but he
denied Anthropic’s request for summary judgment related to
piracy—finding that the piracy was not fair use.[1]
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667411
1 - https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...
Oh wow it must suck to have an LLM creator rip off your IP for their own gain
Distillation is fundamentally impossible to protect against. All you can do is slow them down. Change my view.
Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway.
It's over.
It's too late to prevent distillation of some capabilities, like writing code or finding vulnerabilities [1].
But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics.
Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing proliferation through distillation is considered more important.
[1]: See the notes on distillation in https://dualuse.dev/posts/export-controls-on-fable
Distilled models are necessarily behind so long as models are progressing. Models are progressing. Maybe it will be over some time in the future.
And Berkeley’s “False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs” found imitation closes the style gap fast but there is a large capability gap.
I'm ok with having last months model at a tiny fraction of the price.
Curiously, this isn't always true.
For example, GLM 5.1 is more capable at pentesting than the model from which it is alleged to have been distilled [1].
Intuitively, this makes some sense: you can "distill" from multiple frontier models, and you can further post-train the distilled model. But I'm not sure exactly what happened with GLM 5.1.
[1]: https://dualuse.dev/posts/chinese-models-are-sometimes-bette...
Interesting blog post, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious how that comparison controls for Opus refusing (whether explicitly, or just deciding not to pursue a path) given the caption below the first image:
>A perfect score means the model autonomously found and exploited the vulnerability.
I'm not really suggesting that it's misleading, but wondering if I'm missing something. Otherwise I guess it seems unsurprising that you can distill a better-performing model [in specific focused areas] by simply not distilling refusals?
Got it, thank you!
Im not so sure because we only seem to see distillation from China. What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude, GPT, etc. Do they simply lack the ability to?
Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).
Meta Spark is rumored to have distilled Claude to some extent, early Gemini models as well. I think the biggest factor is that Chinese companies arent really afraid of being sued by Anthropic because the juridictions are so disconnected. European/US companies don't have the same protection.
Aside from politics/law, it's probably much easier for everyone else to distill from the Chinese model which already distilled Claude/GPT/Gemini. Maybe not as good a result, but you don't need to jump through dozens of hoops.
This reminds me of the whisper game played in elementary school. Starts with a sentence and the person whispers it to the next kid who again whispers it and on and on until it goes around the circle where the last kid has to repeat the sentence. Hint it never once was even close to the starting phrase. I would love to see what one model copying another model that is again copied however many times would look like in the end.
>What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude
literally nothing but given that the Chinese already did it and the models are published what's the point. You can thank the Chinese taxpayer for subsidizing the electricity bill and just download the thing
Doesn’t that require them to register an account using the browsers they’ve compromised? If anthropic adds identity verification won’t that cut that down. Maybe it will let them use Gemini inside of chrome
Probably some business will popup, like: "rent part of your unused subscription", or even: "proxy tokens with a premium", eg. 5.5 USD on Opus 4.7 paid by the distiller to the user, that will then only spend 5 USD.
Residential IPs don’t even matter. Developers use devboxes, use Claude Code CLI on servers from just about every cloud, etc.
There’s probably a decent volume of customers who just buy Claude Max and spend most if not nearly all of their sessions via Claude Code, and it’s not uncommon for power users to be working on multiple concurrent projects/tasks/codebases at the same time.
How do you really block this without also impacting your core market of developers?
No, they could easily buy legitimate, already registered accounts and use VPNs.
Why use VPNs? Just use a public cloud like AWS, or something like Linode and Vultr and all that.
Developers use devboxes on these clouds all the time, it’s totally normal behavior.
Most people buying these Chinese resold tokens are probably using it for coding anyway, so you don’t want the Claude.ai chat system prompt.
I can't even come up with a reason to find it wrong.
I personally bristle at the corporate espionage and IP theft that China has undertaken the last few decades. I can't help but respond here whenever anyone brings up the inane comparison to Samuel Slater.
But with this, I don't have an issue. There is no theft since what is being used is the exact product that is being delivered. Yes, it's breaking the ToS, but ToS are generally bullshit. Anthropic surely broke thousands of ToS or other legal terms while it was scraping for content to train on. Which is why they had to pay $1.5B
One simplistic way to describe distillation would be to try everything imaginable and cache the response. But trying everything imaginable is hardly trivial
A partly insider on this.
I think Anthropic is just marketing / bluffing, because they don't even have the data.
They do distill the models, but they don't go to Anthropic, they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform.
>they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform
This is actually the only way that what Anthropic is alleging would make any kind of sense. And, as a matter of fact, is exactly what every enterprise does to train models.
This kerfuffle should be interesting to watch.
But, as always, everyone (in the US) should fully download all the Chinese models while you can. I suspect this may be the "Phantom Menace" they use to render illegal our use of Chinese AI tech just as they've rendered illegal our use of Chinese cars. Only difference is, we peasants may need the Chinese AI tech to have any chance of competing with Big Tech in the future.
And even with the Chinese tech, as Big Tech spreads their AI out into more and more niche areas, we'll likely still not be able to build startups that can compete with them.
It's just that without Chinese AI tech, we'll have no chance at all.
> And even with the Chinese tech, as Big Tech spreads their AI out into more and more niche areas, we'll likely still not be able to build startups that can compete with them.
You mean like Anthropic will eventually run Walmart? Or Salesforce? or Adobe? Or do you think midjourney will replace all medical spas? OpenAI will run the next Tesla? How can they focus on all this without raising trillions more? Why wont the gov force them to stop if they monopolize all niches even if they could?
Building a frontier AI lab and pushing models forward is already a massive undertaking but we are assuming they will also create massively successful startups which nobody can compete with?
idk sounds like the dream of people like Dario but not much sense does it make in the face of economic reality.
there are vibe coded proxies that act like Claude Code. they use the sub not the api key. but they give you api key functionality... I know this cause I have the vibes.... and it works on every one of the other harnesses, it just takes some mitmproxy work... but ya. it's fair to say these are not the droids you're looking for
This is making the case for Anthropic KYC for US citizens. No one would allow their accounts to do this if they were on the hook for it from the US government.
Repeatedly warn everyone that your models are so good they will wreck cybersecurity.
Complain/brag that chinese firms are illegally using the models and bypassing export controls.
Be surprised when your model gets banned by the government.
Karma truly is a bitch
It sounds like Anthropic is eagerly trying to show to USG that they are willing to heavily monitor ‘foreign adversaries’ on their platforms.
This combined with no implementation of KYC makes it seem like they want to find a middle ground with Fable where its off of export controls but they promise to prevent China and specific others from using.
This seems to me like a stab in the right direction.
Obviously their actions are going to be fiscally motivated at the root, but sussing out how they intend the precise dynamics to play out is more nuanced.
Thinking of this as an effort to woo the defense hawks cuts a very clear path.
This is not the first time it happened. What have they done to improve the situation? I suspect it more a cat & mouse game, with a lot more cats playing.
Has anyone else noticed that Deepseek v4 running in Claude Code will try to read, list, tail as many files/logs/... as it can for even the most simple tasks?
Did Alibaba procure tons of stuff from Anthropic without paying, and use it to train a model?
I don't see the issue. Didn't Anthropic train on our data, which it acquired illegally?
So said the guys who "extracted" knowledge from all pirated books
Anthropic being pissed enough to announce this means that, despite encrypting their reasoning chains, it doesn't matter – distillation lives on.
Sweeeeeeeet.
Does anyone have hints on what kinds of prompts are most used for a distillation like this—SWE-Bench sorts of things?
Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?
RLAIF is a good place to start reading.
Claude will also help you with (mostly good advice) if you ask something like “Research and help me make the most effective plan to train a smaller student model to be better from a teacher model”.
I actually was doing an experiment with a GLM->Gemma E4B for fun, and Claude kept on suggesting I should also add Claude Opus as a teacher lol, suggesting techniques I haven’t heard of like thinking inversion (train a small model to deconstruct summarised thinking into detailed native thinking format of the student).
There are some Claude datasets (of indeterminate provenance) floating around on huggingface you can look at (or at least used to be, they might've been taken down).
Incentive is for users in general to release sessions (sans PII, credentials) so all AI get better and there is alternatives. Even if China didn't do this, I don't see frontier labs being able to charge premium over others for long. RSI maybe?
if they’re paying for the tokens, what’s the problem
So let me get this straight, a company which built its whole business on ignoring IP is all of a sudden upset that somebody is not respecting their IP?
Nevermind government edicts & bans -- this seems like reason enough for them to require Know Their Customers, require ID, and shut of certain nations.
Failing to have done so seems to have allowed 25000 fake Chinese accounts to walk off with their product...
OFC I wouldn't trust the Chinese enough to ack their models the time of day, but Anthropic seems to have allowed far more ... yikes
People prefer Chinese models to US models. Looks like it is a counterattack.
I don't see what the problem is. They found a loophole and exploited it. Good for them.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Anthropic keeps throwing stones every few weeks.
Wait so they're upset that people used their IP to train a model without their consent or paying them anything?
or is this just about the token reselling?
A company which got rich on extracting the world's content is complaining that another company has extracted their work?!
LOL!
Get a grip, son.
How do I donate my logs
so what? anthropic stole this functionality from everyone else
Similar to improving an independent search engine by scraping Google search results and learning from it. Shady but legit
Hey, Alanis Morissette, this one is ironic.
The narrative is moving towards KYC
Im all for it.
it sure sucks when people steal your hard work for free without paying for it doesn't it anthropic
It's hard to sympathize with Anthropic for this or the export ban, the hype over model capabilities probably fuels both things (in some ways). Training data for me, but not for thee (at any scale) doesn't seem like a tenable position. If anything, Claude's constitutional outputs should be trained on more rather than less.
If you're an AI booster surely you'd think this was a good thing as it means more models are available in more places to more people more easily. I'm exactly the opposite, and I think this is a good thing because I want Anthropic to suffer.
so it’s a good thing whichever way you look at it
That's exactly right. One can be an AI booster and want Anthropic to suffer, all for the greater good of promoting access and diversity of AI.
That doesnt follow.
Which part?
If true then Alibaba is doing us a public service, good job, I hope this extraction was successful.
Another day, another excuse as to why Fable 5 was pulled. Just waiting for Anthropic saying the Persona partnership was the fault of the Chinese.
What I get from this is frontier model capabilities are being stagnant.
I like that they use “illicit” and “fraudulent” like as if model distillation is illegal and giving them money and then doing whatever they want with the output of their publicly accessible models (which Anthropic does not own) is… also illegal?
“Anthropic, red faced after unattended ice cream cone eaten by ants on park bench, once again demands government pick it as forever winner, adds ‘no take backsies’”
Says the company that is involved in the largest copyright heists of all time to build it's product.
We have Claude at home!
Anthropic training their models full of copyright data, so?
> Meanwhile, on June 12, two days after Anthropic sent the letter, the Commerce Department imposed controversial restrictions on Anthropic's latest Mythos and Fable AI models because officials feared they could be deployed by military intelligence users in China and other countries of concern.
So that was the real reason for the Fable restriction? Because Anthropic wrote a letter to the US government saying that China was distilling Fable?
I'm sorry, but I can't stop laughing at an AI company crying about theft of their IP.
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"
“Hey! Haven’t you heard that two wrongs don’t make a right?!”
- Entitled jerk that initially wronged people
willy wonka oh-go-on-dot-gif
Gosh, overusing accounts running up unplanned-for expenses?
Kinda reminds me of...overusage charges and inflated expenses clients have had to deal with because Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, etc have been "illicitly extracting" everything they can grab from said websites, as fast as they can. In what amounts to a DDOS, frankly.
Notice how Anthropic is now scapegoating Chinese models providers like Alibaba and outright accusing them of distilling their models.
Whether if it is true or not, this is part of their effort into using them as an example to scare everyone into getting congress to ban powerful models from being accessed outside of the US and also banning powerful local models from being released.
Anthropic does not care about you, and they are not your friends.
I think it’s more than that. Piecing together the perspective of a few commentators in this post - it’s plausible Anthropic is trying to shift the narrative from US vs. Rest of the world to US vs. China.
In other words, they want to sell Fable or future more powerful models to rest of the world (presumably all future models are going to be more powerful than current gen). One way they can sell this is to the government is by scapegoating China (which is their primary concern anyway).
This is working on the presumption that non-US companies form a material portion of their current revenue.
> Whether if it is true or not
If it was just "that easy" then I doubt only "Chinese models" would be doing it and we'd already be packed with competition.
Distilling might be a thing but it isn't a free win.
Only China really has the resources (multiple labs invested in the space), culture (Asians are generally collectively-inclined, so sharing is in their core) and political bent (there will be no diplomatic repercussions) to put up a fight.
> Only China really has the resources (multiple labs invested in the space)
That's not the point. Why is it a country thing? There are plenty of non-China startups in this space having resources at that scale. The "China" has resources is some "Western media narrative" speak. So Meta should have won a long time ago? Or xAI?
> culture (Asians are generally collectively-inclined, so sharing is in their core)
Just stereotype it? So we've gone from China -> "Asian"? Then where is your Korean or Japanese model etc? And somehow you know they're sharing.
> political bent (there will be no diplomatic repercussions) to put up a fight
More inferring from "Western media news"?
Where's the reality?
The media hyped up Gemini / Google TPU free-win last year. How did that go?
> Why is it a country thing?
Because the China vs US geopolitical situation is a thing. Meta is a social media company, not an AI company, and they direct their focus as such. xAI just never got serious traction so now they're selling their compute. Also if a US company were caught distilling, I think Anthropic could actually take them to court, and I'd guess they don't want that kind of PR.
> Just stereotype it?
Is China not Asian? Are Asians not generally collective/cooperative, as opposed to individualistic/competitive?
The "and" that joined those 3 items is very important: it means you can't pull them apart and address them independently as they each contribute to the context. I'm not too sure about Korea, but in a way Japan is a US colony in all but name. Both are very much politically intertwined with the West (along with RoC/Taiwan), which means nothing major that may be against US interest happens.
The reality is that China and the US are essentially in a trade war, where the latter is trying its best to keep the former in the Dark Ages, because "national security", but the former is refusing to take it lying down and continues to make progress regardless[0], because they have the resources and will.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/china-lineshine-supercomputer-to...
lol. good for the chinese. I hope their models get better than the closed american ones quick so we can stop using "controlled" models.
Well, of course they did. Are you kidding?
we now know what to use when Fable is too dangerous !
How dare they! Only we should be illicitely extracting everything others done!
/Anthropic-probably
laughs in ironic
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Here is what is happening:
American AI companies are offering text and code and other content they illegally scraped from the internet and reselling it packaged as “AI subscriptions” making it impossible for many professionals to compete as they are competing with impossibly cheap, resold stolen goods.
Chinese labs turning the LLMs into open source, making all that money burn that is making so many things unaffordable for us now is literally the best outcome possible.
i still want those data sets to become public domain. open weights still isnt good enough
This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.
I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win.
Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?
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.
>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
"Information wants to be free"
Anthropic profited from training its models on all kinds of copyrighted information, live by the sword, die by the sword...
Their model weights, training data, training methods, etc are all going to leak to China over time.
Nobody on a site named _Hacker_ news should be all that upset about this.
There is no real difference
Seriously AI companies complaining about fair use is the biggest case of crocodile tears I can think of. Irony has been dead for a while, but they dug up the corpse and set it on fire anyway.
Bootlegging is copyright theft.
Is Claude output copyrighted?
If anything, a tremendous amount of Claude’s input is copyrighted.
If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
>>If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
>US courts have consistently ruled it's fair use.
And they also have ruled that the that output of an AI isn't copyrightable.
As such copying claudes output isnt even fair use as that is an exemption to copyright but the same as copying public domain work which any and all are allowed to do.
and Chinese courts are ruling that using Claude is fair use.
> US courts have consistently ruled its fair use.
Like Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations “‘Free market’ is when a company receives a favorable ruling about copyright in the United States”
The output of Claude is not eligible for copyright protection. I'm not sure how the analogy of bootlegging DVDs would work, given that.
It's quite curious how multi billion dollar enterprises can't compete with a Chinese bootlegger with a big jacket, tbh.
Imagine having such a warchest and being so bad at business, lol.
ZDR but that is meaningless if the person wants to do nothing more than cheat on homework (or has enough hardware to run a local model)
BigAI are all in the bootlegging market themselves, so it's always funny to see them complaining about others copying their "product".
And those darned printing presses distributing works that were written prior to their existence.
More like one bootlegger complaining that another bootlegger is copying their bootleg DVDs.
I bet you've downloaded a car.
This is also a good thing fwiw.
> Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!
It's supremely ironic analogize distillation to copyright infringement when it's literally what Anthropic was found guilty of. It's not illegal to distill. It is illegal to pirate. And it's what Anthropic was found guilty of, not Alibaba.
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
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.
> the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious
This is not the right deduction.
China blocks foreign AI from operating there.
> China blocks foreign AI from operating there.
Given the current US government's tightening of export control restrictions and the introduction of a bipartisan bill to block use of Chinese AI in federal agencies, I'd say the two countries' positions are not far apart.
https://apnews.com/article/ai-china-united-states-competitio...
That is ALSO happening, but that's beside the point.
Chinese AI apps like DeepSeek are freely available for ordinary Americans to download and use. There's no federal law banning private citizens from using them.
So to claim that Chinese companies are better at selling American companies' work than the American companies can do themselves when they are prohibited from operating in that market, is the wrong deduction to make.
> 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.
What is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright?
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
as in, the main trade complaint that trump has with nafta. the Uzs wants to dump subsidized dairy on canadian markets, and canada doesnt want it.
same with US corn on Mexico and other central american countries, creating all those migrant problems in north america.
wooo, americans subsidizing and dumping poor quality goods
> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.
Just a data point, but the US currently imposes a 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles.
> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
The US is a net importer, not exporter. It needs to absorb trade at a deficit to encourage the use of the US dollar as the reserve currency.
We import goods, we settle in surplus dollars. The world runs on those dollars.
If the US starts dumping on various industries (how is it even primed to do this?), then the world reserve currency status comes into question.
Most of the Chinese domestic market is open to foreign competition. The areas that are closed off are those that are politically sensitive: publishing (including social media) and banking.
As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.
How do you think the major AI companies trained there model? Pirated books and anything that could be torrented and scraped of the web.
Don’t know about that…
America industries used to play by the same rules. Look up Samuel Slater.
A credit system that determine your upward mobility?
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
If you keep studying econ you will learn that these failures are actually the norm, and thus why the only "capitalist" states to really succeed have been the ones where the state was strong enough to reign in the market.
Of course, such a state of affairs is temporary at best -- since the alternative is so lucrative!
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.
>The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
How does are bans against consensual financial exchanges close to the "ideal" of the free market? It just sounds like you have an axe to grind about the financial system rather than describing free markets.
What makes this view more correct than say, "economies with marketing creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to marketing" and concluding that nothings a free market until we ban all advertising? After all, you can make a vaguely plausible argument about how marketing isn't really about the merits of the product, and therefore allowing it is antithetical to the free market or whatever
...except Uber STILL faces competition, and I went back to hotels after finding AirBnB too pricy.
It is good and proper that people aim to create monopolies, as long as they want to do that in a productive and legal way! Monopolies are inherently dangerous, but the truth is that acquiring and maintaining one is not straightforward unless you can get the government to ban your competitors.
Graeber was a confabulator with a very loose grasp of the facts, though.
>religious prescriptions against usury.
Without interest why would anyone loan money? Even the Islamic banking alternatives all just hide the interest charges.
So equity instead of debt.
Usury is so delicious to many that it’s unfathomable to consider any other incentive comparing to it
reasonable interest rates aren't exploitation. Business Loans serve a critical role in economic activity by putting free cash to more productive use.
That's not true. Islamic finance forbids indefinitely growing interest. Sharia finance agreements involve fixed fees or equity shares. Late penalties can be collected but must be donated, not profit. In all cases, the borrower never owes to the lender for the lender to keep more an a fixed amount determined at the strat.
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.
I used to think this.. but I think my opinion is changing. The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster.
So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.
> The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster
Model improvement is already hitting diminishing returns, and people aren't willing to pay substantially more for a slightly better model. There's no "accelerating away" when the new models don't open up a huge new market. If anything, the companies burning huge amounts of money on marginal improvements will be undercut by companies happy to sell current models at a significantly lower cost.
Most white-collar/knowledge-service-industry work is a weird type of work.
It's fundamentally about enabling things and largely middleman-type stuff. I have a hard time imaging what "At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to." would even look like? What are you doing with that AI power, and who is paying for the output and why?
Elon probably isn't gonna spend that much on a model that can generate him ever-better fake porn but does nothing that he can use to sell stuff to other people. Especially in a world where open models are "good enough" for many things like "tell me how to fix the plants in my garden that are dying" and the like. What remains in the narrow knowledge-work space of: can't be done by an individual or small group themselves, but is valuable enough that it would make sense for people to hoard access to these extreme frontier models? Try to recreate Hollywood-as-a-monopoly by becoming the single content producer for everyone's individualized feed and so owning all the advertising budget in the world? Seems hard, we've already seen how easy it is for cheap-and-crappy-but-addictive-or-funny content to disrupt traditional media.
(There's also pure scientific research, but historically that's not very directly connected to "massive profit" and has a habit of leaking out and getting productized most effectively by other people or just being really easy to copy once someone shows how it's done.)
Robotics could be a different story, as physical labor can be more inherently productive, but "reasoning" advantages are unlikely to be a big long-term differentiator there. At some point the brick laying robot is satisfactorily building the structure, and you're good.
A huge amount of the value of "the economy" and the power of a currency is driven by circulation of money, and one thing that all the "bullshit jobs" white-collar/service-industry work does is keep the money moving and ensure that a lot of people have some good-or-services of value to exchange. If you take away the ability to offer services worth exchange from huge chunks of the economy in these super-frontier-models-replace-everything scenarios... you're gonna have a bad time?
Glm 5.2 very much argues against that. Opus 4.8 level quality for cheap. That’s sufficient for most tasks, so if/when you do need SOTA models you can spend more for specific tasks but otherwise rely on the cheap but still plenty good models for everything else
The issue is who is going to pay for access?
The model has to be sold for cheaper than the value it adds.
Or your customers will bleed out financially.
EDIT: rethought entire premise.
Correct.
And the value-add experiences that utilise LLMs require immense imagination et al that folks at Anthropic will not be able to conceive of - given that they have made immense sunk investments in existing assets. This clouds ones thinking immensely.
Both OAI and Anthropic have tremendous failure risk and this is of course not reflected in the fake private market valuations.
I see a world where lots of stuff is mass produced in china (tokens) but the acutal goods that deliver the experiences are designed, marketed and sold in the west at much higher prices. of course this a nightmare scenario for anthropic et al.
You seem to not get how pervasive and evil the Chinese State is at making everything thing shit for citizen world wide. This is one of the reasons.
Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.
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.
Postage stamps have specific legal protection from duplication. The output of an LLM is not itself eligible for any legal IP protection.
If it's streaming an uncopyrightable product, absolutely. This isn't even a gray area.
I'm curious why you think you cannot re-stream a public domain stream.
Post offices aren't meant to operate in the free market. More things should be like them.
I guess you missed the fraud part.
Pulling out the worlds smallest violin for this case. It's just unheard of for AI companies to steal things.
Has any tribunal ruled that fraud did happen?
>Fraud
According to which lawyer caste?
Are American laws absolute truth? If not, who cares?
I mean, which lawyer caste do you respect? Is that one is cool with stealing credit cards to buy Claude subscriptions?
> 3. At an Italian airport: Constantly stealing bags, opening them to pick out MacBooks and credit cards, a credit card manufacturer-who sells stolen "black" credit card info to transfer stations— is racking his brains to save you money.
Fraud is just what losers call disruption.
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> This is one reason why Deepseek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.
This one does not make sense to me at all.
Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.
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.
> Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens.
You mean it's functionally as if American tokens are being price dumped in China and Chinese model providers are being forced to compete with that and innovate? So many delicious layers of irony, lol :-P
China also have trust issue with American companies. Most of State-owned companies will not use those services even if they can directly access them.
And? The US feds wont allow even local Qwen or Deepseek models either. "Evul godless commies" or some such nonsense.
If other providers can match Deepseek's first party prices, that probably means that the economics for running inferencing work out for them.
Urm, no? I man they did cut prices by 75% that part is true - but they reduced a starting price that was below sonnet.
Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.
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.
One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright:
- Purchase multiple accounts via resellers
- Send messages that contain a UID
- Capture these in Anthropic's logs
- Shut down account. Use any metadata to identify related accounts
/loop
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".
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 a much better way to investigate this than what some other posters here are suggesting, like blocking datacenters, because then you’re going to break a million developers using Claude Code on devboxes.
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.
>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs.
>Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude
But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
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.
And phone number verification too? So that's 3 hurdles to jump to just get opus.
for verification you can buy phone number for $1 easily.
> 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.
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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.
Somebody figured out how to make the trial profitable!
I don't really feel bad about anyone here, they were subsidizing to get people hooked, someone turned the subsidies into profit when they got selective pricing mode enabled, it was always going to be arbitrage.
But the winner is the guy in the middle in a jurisdiction that will likely be judgement proof, because everything they capture, both input and out, and if available, thinking tokens -- are gonna be for sale as soon as you cut off their other revenue.
Zero knowledge was a commitment Anthropic took seriously, until it got inconvenient.
So, people reselling their leftover plan crumbs? Probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it's civil, and I wish Anthropics lawyers actually closing Streisand's LLM
I don’t follow your reasoning. It is foreign to me. You talk about winners, but this is clearly fraud.
Fraud?
Anthropic sells some undisclosed and ever-changing number of tokens for $200, the customer uses those tokens. If there's any fraud here, it's that the $200 next month is silently worth fewer tokens than the last.
Also just plain old fraud: selling Chinese models as Opus. With the capabilities of Chinese models catching up fast, this is getting more and more difficult to detect.
What does this have to do with Alibaba? Are you saying Alibaba is the reseller?
If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.
They buy the logs from the bot farmers
Are logs somehow used for the purpose of training their own models or something else?
Distillation from having enough logs
Thats pretty crazy. This kind of thing jeopardizes Claude Max.
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.
Almost all consumer services have a built-in level of breakage that make them profitable. Mobile providers certainly wouldn't be able to offer unlimited calling if everyone was actually on the phone 24x7.
Terminating a PSTN call requires a lot of control plane infrastructure beyond just raw bandwidth. Especially mobile where you need to keep track of devices physically in motion. Could a system to support 4 billion simultaneous calls be built, sure. But current PSTN systems are nowhere near sized for it.
The over subscribed gym model!
But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.
Office 365 is licensed per seat/account, but each account has a 5 device limit. Do you think it's fair game for an enterprising person to sub license each account to 5 people, 1 device each?
You can write whatever contract you like, the problem is how to enforce it, and a greater problem is enforcing it around the world.
Plenty of things are intentionally run at a loss (for years!) to gain market share and quantity of ongoing recurring users, or with expectation of ROI later on. Multiple generations of the Xbox hardware have been sold at a loss with the expectation that customers will purchase 300, 400, 500 dollars worth of games, which are very high margin, over the lifespan they own the system.
> you're just gambling you won't get found out.
It's not so much keeping it secret as counting on no one finding a way to harvest the subsidized value at scale. There's an example of that occurring in game consoles with the Playstation 3. Sony's little-used OtherOS feature allowed Linux to be installed on the PS3 and the Cell processors were quite a good deal for scale compute. So the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory bought ~1800 PS3s and ganged them together in a datacenter as a supercomputer called Condor.
At >500 TFLOPs it was the 33rd fastest supercomputer in the world. Of course, Sony pushed a firmware update that removed the OtherOS feature entirely.
Oh they know what they’re doing. They’re playing the long war of attrition game. Subsidize your product to undercut your competition until they go out of business. Tale as old as time.
Another post on fractional banking hahahaha.
I suggest you go learn how money is created in the modern economy.
I mean most of you should stop talking about anything finance related until you learn this stuff properly.
> It works as long as nobody calls out the emperor for having no clothes.
Why would customers knowing that the vendor prices goods/services at a loss cause those strategies to fail? Customers often know. Most know about razors and blades; many/most know Lyft/Uber operated at a loss to gain market share. etc.
In international trade, isn’t this called dumping which gets major political pushback?
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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
Where are you getting cheap GLM5.2? It is about 1/3 the price of Opus, which is not what I would call cheap.
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
This story reads like a William Gibson novel. Wild times.
no honor among thieves.
Hm! In this context, introducing ID verification may have been a significant silver lining to the order to take down Fable for Anthropic.
This also sheds a very different light on people saying that competitive open-source models are undermining frontier labs' business model.
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...
Wait, so is your theory mutually exclusive to Anthropic's claims of "theft of capabilities"?
No, this reseller 中转站 thing is basically a loss leader for certain chinese ai labs to distill claude with verified human input.
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.
Why aren't these on openrouter?
>>Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices.
Can someone with more understanding dumb it down for me please.
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???? why would XYZ offer this at a loss like that when they could just offer it at Anthropic's price???
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".
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.
Summarizing for you: Anthropic is a stupid company that let everybody steal their tokens
Behold the mindset of an individual from a low-trust society.
“x is stupid because y was smart and did z shady/illegal things at their expense, if x was smart they wouldn’t be susceptible to y going to great lengths to exploit them ergo it’s deserved”
They could run their service at a profit?
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
How are they 'streaming' the responses and 'pooling' the tokens?
Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.
Not going to work for very long or at any scale coming from datacenter/hosting provider IPs. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of how they snowshoe the traffic.
I use my Codex and Claude Code subs on like 4-6 different servers, ranging from AWS to Vultr to Linode etc.
That’s a major and legitimate use case for developers, Anthropic can’t just block data center/hosting IPs because their actual customers use them on data center/hosting IPs.
Respectfully, no, that's not how it works. You think the people running anti-fraud and anti-bot measures don't have tools that know the specific ipv4 and ipv6 CIDR ranges of every ASN that they categorize as hosting/colo providers?
And that's just as a basic first effort reject measure to prevent automation tools from using things designed for human-interactive use only.
Go try to do many of these things from Cogent IP space and see how long your project lasts.
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.
Why would they use Max 5x instead of Max 20x, which is cheaper relatively speaking?
Don’t trust my experiences as fact since it’s a bit opaque, but I believe 20x only offers 4x the 5hr session limits. The weekly limit is still 2x, which is the same as the price increase.
You're right, they're using the $200 Max plan, which I thought was the 5x plan. It's talked about in the article I linked.
the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
that explains why theyre blocking me. i have privacy controls up high and they must think im a chinese residential proxy bot
ask your gpt how does openrouter work, then ask, how do proxies work.
They probably asked claude how to do it.
Needless to say, they also collect all the data and sell it to labs which want to distill the models they’re serving.
Im ok with this! Is there a site that list all these resellers, or better, a openrouter-like for these resellers?
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. 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.
> 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.
Random, but are the frontier AI providers like ChatGPT better at searching the Chinese internet now?
When I was in China a few months ago and asking AI for restaurant recommendations, all the US frontier providers were pretty useless, or plain out hallucinating, even if I specifically ask them to search Dianping (Yelp for China).
I'm not sure. I use Grok for most of my esoteric searches and it does quite well. I explicitly prompt it to search in the language most relevant to that query, and found it does quite well. I also tell it to respond back in English. Often, there is not enough information available in English about nice regional topics.
I know ChatGPT had an issue where it only tried to search in English (unless prompted) and the answers were not great.
Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to.
Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way.
I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility.
Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless.
So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function,
where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag...According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function.
Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product.
I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process;
Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.
Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered)
You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google.
You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians.
It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out.
And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos."
Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please."
Just saying.
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).
But I can rebuild glm Using open source methods…
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.