AI tokens 10x cheaper: the Chinese scheme

A study by the Oxford China Policy Lab has revealed a massive grey market for API tokens in China, offering access to models at discounts of up to 90%.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-06-26Updated 2026-06-26

2026-06-26 Business Anthropic

💼 AI tokens 10x cheaper: the Chinese scheme

A study by the Oxford China Policy Lab has revealed a grey market for API tokens in China with discounts of up to 90%. Key schemes include: data distillation, model substitution, and proxy arbitrage.

🌍 Risks: threat to IP and acceleration of illegal model distillation.

👤 Consequences: risk of data leaks and the use of weak models disguised as powerful ones.

Source 1: https://abit.ee/en/artificial-intelligence/claude-anthropic-grey-market-china-ai-distillation-data-harvesting-proxy-services-en Source 2: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chinese-grey-market-sells-claude-api-access-at-90-percent-off-through-proxy-networks-that-harvest-user-data

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