China's Claude token-reseller gray market keeps Anthropic access flowing despite its restrictions
What's happening? Chinese "token resellers" and API proxies — known locally as transfer stations (中转站) — are routing access to Anthropic's Claude into China even though Anthropic does not officially serve the market, The Information reported in an exclusive by Jing Yang, Juro Osawa and Qianer Liu. In one Beijing Haidian office building, about six of roughly thirty tenants were said to resell Claude and other US model access; nationwide estimates run to tens of thousands of such outfits.
How the supply chain works: Resellers run overseas servers that accept API requests, forward them as if they came from a supported location, and bill Chinese users in RMB via WeChat or Alipay. Upstream brokers mass-register Anthropic accounts (sometimes with bulk email from older crypto ventures), foreign SMS platforms supply phone numbers, and some operators create shell companies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East or the US to sign enterprise or AWS deals. Public write-ups of the same market describe prices as low as about 10% of official rates by pooling Max plans, farming free credits and exploiting education or enterprise discounts.
Why it matters: The gray market is both a revenue-quality and an export-control signal. Anthropic has accused Chinese labs, including DeepSeek, of distilling Claude via large volumes of fraudulent accounts; the same reseller layer that serves hobbyists and developers also feeds that demand. Legitimate routers such as OpenRouter sit next to this proxy economy, while Chinese labs like Moonshot AI compete on the domestic side. Anthropic's bans and stricter ownership checks have not shut the market; they have pushed buyers toward more opaque workarounds.
Fact vs. inference: The Haidian building vignette and the reseller mechanics come from The Information 's reporting and corroborating public analyses (ChinaTalk / Oxford China Policy Lab). Claims about the share of stolen-card-funded accounts, or how much Chinese lab progress depends on Claude distillation, remain contested and are not settled by this reporting alone.
Read more: The Information · ChinaTalk · The Decoder
