Claude is not officially offered to customers in China, so a gray market has grown up to supply it. The reported chain has three links. Resellers register accounts with identities they have accumulated. They sometimes pay with cards funded in USDT. Then “transfer stations”, proxy services that sit between users and Anthropic, relay prompts through access established outside China. Anthropic describes these intermediaries as a source of fraud and abuse. Its own report says some operators keep users’ exchanges without their knowledge. For a user, the practical risk is that a stranger may be able to read what they type and that the access can be cut off.
The evidence is uneven. The USDT-card detail comes from one reseller’s account reported by The Information, and nothing cited here shows how common it is. The large numbers in this story are Anthropic’s own findings about its own investigations, not an independent measurement of the market. This article separates those layers and is an explanation of the system, not a guide to using it.
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Why a gray market exists at all
The market sits on top of an access restriction. A March 2026 report from the industry group CCIA says Anthropic had not released its chat interface in China and restricted API access for Chinese and Hong Kong customers in 2024, citing compliance and security considerations. That report is useful history, not a live availability page. Anthropic’s September 2026 threat-intelligence report describes the restrictions as continuing and says it enforces them against abuse.
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How the supply chain is described
Step one: obtaining accounts
The Information reports that resellers register Claude accounts using email addresses and identities accumulated through earlier work in crypto, ecommerce and other sectors. The idea is that the reseller already holds a stock of usable digital identities, so new accounts are cheap to produce. The article is subscription-gated, so only the excerpt can be relied on here.
Step two: paying
The same report describes one reseller paying for Claude accounts with cards funded by USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin. This is a single reported example. Nothing cited here shows what share of resellers pay this way, and it should not be read as the market’s standard method.
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Anthropic describes payment abuse more broadly. It says proxy services create accounts using false identities, fake or stolen cards and stolen API keys to get around geographic restrictions. Those are Anthropic’s characterisations of the abuse it detects, and they are separate from the USDT example.
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Anthropic calls these intermediaries proxy services or “transfer stations”. WIRED describes a typical service as buying Anthropic API access outside China and redistributing tokens to Chinese users. The user does not log in to Claude directly. Their requests go to the intermediary, which forwards them through the overseas access it controls. The user is therefore buying capacity from the reseller and never holds a relationship with Anthropic.
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Three routes that are easy to confuse
Coverage uses “reseller” for several different arrangements. The table separates them by what the user controls, who can see prompts, and how well the claims are established.
| Route | Who holds the account or key | Who can see submitted prompts | Exposure to enforcement | Evidence status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sale or sharing of existing Claude accounts | The seller originates the account; the buyer borrows it | The seller may retain access to the account’s history; Anthropic can see activity on its own platform | Anthropic says it bans accounts and, in some suspected-abuse cases, requires identity verification | Described in The Information’s reporting (excerpt only); prevalence not established |
| API-token relaying through a transfer station | The operator holds the overseas API credentials | The operator sits in the path of every request. Anthropic says some operators save exchanges without users’ knowledge | Anthropic says it works to detect and disrupt proxy networks, so a user’s access depends on the operator staying undetected | Described by both Anthropic and WIRED |
| Account pools Anthropic attributes to covert distillation | The pool is run by an organisation, not an individual reseller | Anthropic can observe the traffic as exchanges with its own models | Targeted by Anthropic’s attribution and disruption work | Allegations from Anthropic’s own investigations |
The third route is not ordinary resale. Anthropic uses the term illicit distillation: “an industrial-scale, covert campaign to extract a model’s capabilities and replicate them in another model without authorization.” The relevant question there is who is extracting model behaviour at scale, not who is buying a cheaper chatbot.
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The privacy problem for ordinary users
The most direct consequence for a person using a transfer station is that the operator is a middleman for every prompt. Anthropic says proxy operators may save users’ exchanges without their knowledge or consent, and that some labs bought such exchanges for model training. WIRED reports that prompts submitted to transfer stations can be exposed or sold.
These are documented risks and observed practices in some cases. They are not proof that every intermediary logs or sells data. But a user cannot normally audit what a given station does, and the incentives are not reassuring. A seller that is already operating on fraudulent or borrowed access has little reason to treat customer data carefully.
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The same pattern shows up beyond this market. IT Pro’s August 2026 coverage of underground forums selling discounted AI tokens, based on Okta Threat Intelligence, describes broader reselling of AI access and its prompt-visibility risks. It is not a measurement of the China Claude market specifically.
What Anthropic says it does about it
In its report, Anthropic says it relies on metadata and irregular-activity signals, classifiers, organisational attribution, account bans and, in some suspected-abuse cases, identity verification. Spokesperson Michael Aciman told WIRED that the company uses evolving detection systems, including identity verification, and has worked to detect and disrupt proxy networks that supply access to the chatbot in China. For anyone relying on a reseller, that means access can disappear without warning, and an account that was bought, shared or generated cheaply is the sort Anthropic says it looks for.
The numbers Anthropic has published, and what they cover
These figures come from the company’s September 2026 report. They describe what Anthropic says it observed and attributed. They are not independent audits, and they do not size the reseller market as a whole. The coverage cited here quotes no response from the named companies.
- Seven China-based labs. Anthropic says that since its first disclosure in February it has identified and disrupted further distillation attacks from seven labs based in China.
- More than 151 million exchanges. Anthropic attributes this volume, observed between May and July 2026, to a campaign by Alibaba.
- Nearly 5,000 fraudulent accounts. Anthropic says one account pool attributed to Alibaba used residential proxies, disposable emails and virtual-card payments.
- Nearly 3 million exchanges per day. The report says the Alibaba campaign peaked at this rate across more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts.
- Almost 300,000 requests in ten days. In a separate case, Anthropic says requests from Moonshot customers were routed to Claude over ten days. It is an example of reported illicit distillation. It is not a count of what ordinary account resellers move.
The fraud methods Anthropic lists, such as disposable emails, virtual cards and residential proxies, partly overlap with those in the reseller reporting. That overlap shows the same tools appear at different scales. It does not show that the individual resellers in The Information’s account are linked to the labs Anthropic names.
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What remains unknown
- How common USDT-funded cards are among resellers, since the only source is one individual’s account.
- How large the market is by users, tokens or revenue. No independent estimate appears in the coverage cited here.
- How many transfer stations actually retain or sell prompts, beyond the cases Anthropic and WIRED describe.
- Where the line falls between individual resale and the organised pools Anthropic attributes to labs. Anthropic’s attributions are its own and have not been tested independently.
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