Chinese resellers are offering Claude

tokens at 70 to 90% below official

Anthropic prices. Now, I don't even know

what to do with that statement. What are

we even talking about? There's a black

market for tokens? Yes. Yes, there is.

There is an entire economy built around

this this black market, this gray

market, this shadow API economy. So,

we're actually going to go over who's

using it, why they're using it, how this

actually even works. How do they have it

at 70 to 90% off because I mean that

sounds kind of nice. Did they solve They

solved something we don't understand.

And also, I'm going to toss my little

hat into the ring and I'm going to give

you a reason why I think things are as

cheap as they are. I got my own little

personal theory that I'll unleash at the

end. All right, so to understand this

entire gray market universe, you have to

understand the fundamental unit.

Everything is around this idea of a

transit station. What this is is it goes

from the great country of China and it

takes in requests going to these transit

stations and then out they go to say

Anthropic or OpenAI and then pipe the

results back in back to the people

behind these intelligence iron curtains.

These countries that are not allowed to

access OpenAI or Anthropic because of

government restrictions. Now, you're

probably thinking this this sounds like

a VPN. It is. This is exactly how a VPN

effectively works. You from your

computer make requests, it goes up to a

VPN, the VPN then goes off and makes the

request and funnel everything back to

you. This is exactly the same thing

except for they do it through these

transit stations. Now, you're probably

saying, "Well, what's the difference

between a transit station and say open

router?"

Nothing. Just just just legality, that's

all. Well, and and also

fraud and and many other things, but but

effectively nothing. So, it's just good

to keep in mind when I talk about

accessing the data and everything, it's

all done through these transit stations

cuz I think it makes a lot of the rest

of the story make sense. So, this is

kind of the fundamental unit of this

entire black market economy. But before

we continue, hey, I'd like to say thank

you to the sponsors. Hey, is that HTTP?

Get that out of here. That's not how we

order coffee. We order coffee via SSH

terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real

experience? You want real coffee? You

want awesome subscription so you never

have to remember again? Oh, you want

exclusive blends with exclusive coffee

and exclusive content? Then check out

Cron. You don't know what SSH is?

Well, maybe the coffee's not for you.

>> Terminal [singing]

coffee

in hand

living the

dream.

>> When you hear that the Chinese are using

these transit stations, your first

thought is Dario was right. They are

doing distillation attacks. Well, no,

no, no, actually, calm down. That's not

actually what's happening. The people

who are using it is people who want to

use the models to do something. Now, I'm

not going to say what they're doing is

actually good, but they're doing things

with the models, whether it's just

programming, building applications, or

scamming people. But the point is it's

not a distillation attack in itself.

Instead, it's actually representing real

work. People actually using these

transit stations to do something. But

this is where things kind of get

interesting. Like, how would a transit

station actually work? From this amazing

article, how to buy cheap Claude tokens

in China, it actually kind of goes

through what's going on at these transit

stations. Upstream are the resource

providers, account merchants who bulk

register or acquire Anthropic accounts

at scale. Now, you're thinking, how

would you bulk register thousands, if

not tens of thousands of accounts with

Anthropic? Well, luckily, there's this

other article that actually explains how

you could do exactly that. See, there's

three problems. Each account needs a

unique browser fingerprint, a unique

residential IP, and a way through phone

and ID verification. Browsers have moved

past Playwright plus stealth plugins to

anti-detect browsers. Now, I did not

know this that there was these

anti-detection browsers. And there's

actually quite a few of them right here

listed right here. In fact, there's a

bunch of headless ones that are actually

identical to operating as Chrome would

so that the receiver of these messages

can't actually tell if you are or are

not from Chrome. Which means that

defenders that have been fighting this

network layer for a decade, they've

lost. You can no longer tell from the

wire if you're actually getting

legitimate traffic or not. At least

that's what's kind of being claimed with

these anti-detect browsers. But what

about SMS? That has to be hard, right?

Well, no, actually that's the cheapest

defeat in the pipeline is phone

verification, it turns out. It turns out

you can get a whole bunch of SIMs for

pretty dang cheap. And you can also

acquire SMS numbers pretty dang cheap.

See, the thing I guess a lot of us don't

think about is that at one point in

life, SMS was a pretty good proxy for

personhood. One phone number belongs to

one person. That's just no longer the

case anymore. It's really cheap to get

phone numbers these days. It costs about

.8 of an Abraham Lincoln, a one penny, a

cent. I think them British call them a

pence. I'm not really sure. I don't I

don't I don't speak British, okay? I

don't speak British. In other words,

these transit stations, they rely on

these SS SMS services to kind of do

phone verification. But then there's a

second problem. What about ID

verification? That has to be harder,

right? Well, it turns out jumping into

this 404 article by Joseph Cox,

no, actually it's not that hard. In

fact, a Telegram organized site operator

pseudonym John Wick selling AI-generated

driver's licenses, passports, and

national IDs for $15 each, auto

composited onto plausible carpet

bedsheet backgrounds, claimed the

throughput up to 20,000 documents per

day. Which by the way, even at half of

that, if they did that for a year, is

$50 million.

Now, these passports, they were actually

really sophisticated because the

technical move that makes them pass is

the MRZ, the the dashes, the little

carrots, lines at the bottom of the

passports encoding personal data plus

three check digits and a global checksum

per ICAO 9303.

Apparently earlier they were getting

caught by these validations, but they

got so sophisticated, these backends

that would validate if this was a real

license or not or a real passport were

like, "Yeah, bro, these are actually

really good. You can get by a whole set

of ID verification just via AI." There

was a whole like meta getting all these

accounts stolen because all you had to

do was go to the meta bot and be like,

"Yo, bro, I'm totally this person."

Generated deep fake of you holding an ID

of the person that doesn't actually

exist and then the meta bot was like,

"Sure, that's totally cool. You're now

this person. Would you like to reset the

password?" And a whole bunch of people

got their accounts stolen. But,

sometimes you need real IDs. And if you

need real IDs, this is where the story

gets a bit uneasy how these transit

stations operate. Anthropic has started

implementing identity verification. You

need a passport and a selfie to use

certain features. This is where the

advantages of AI transportations from

the crypto circle comes in. By the way,

crypto ruining everything, classic

crypto. We're back to the stage of being

our most familiar KYC manufacturers

braving the risks of Ebola in Africa to

find locals to help with face scan

verifications and selling IDs. Buying a

smiling teeth photo from a local for $5

and selling it for $100 to a ByteDance

programmer at Zaichen Road in Beijing.

Other circles can't handle this kind of

hardship, but we KYC manufacturers in

the crypto circle can.

>> [laughter]

>> Yeah, bro, dude, they're so good, man.

Those crypto bros are so

They're just They're just braving the

conditions. Apparently there's even a

Worldcoin black market. I did not

realize that where they're actually

duping locals to scan their eyeballs and

then selling those black market IDs so

that you can be like, "Oh yeah, I'm

totally this person. I have my

Worldcoin. Yeah. I totally I I totally

am from Zimbabwe." So, one of the last

little spokes here is actual real

people. We're talking about real people

selling their IDs. Now, the crazy part

about this entire gigantic circle right

here is that there's tons of transit

stations. There's tons of SMS carriers.

There's tons of these AI-generated and

real people identification services. So,

to actually stop this stop this blob is

effectively impossible. These black

markets, these gray markets, they just

exist and you can take down one SMS,

it's not going to affect the the transit

station. It's not going to affect the

IDs. They all just keep on going this

this amorphous replaceable modular

system. I mean, it's a very

amazing feat of engineering as bad as it

is. Now, that's how they operate. That's

how these things work, but the real

question comes down to how are they so

cheap, right? Like, there has to be a

story behind it. Well, there's multiple

layers of fraud and let me explain. One

thing these transit stations do is they

actually use the Claude Max plan and

able to kind of create a pool of Claude

agents so that you can kind of route

traffic to to use each one of their

weekly limits. So, that way they get

cheaper tokens if needed. Now, that

obviously does not cut the cost to where

they really need it, but it gets really

close. It could possibly break them down

to even. But, that's not really the type

of fraud you were probably thinking

because that's not really where they do

a lot of the big stuff. But, the more

interesting way in which they save money

and allow for these cheap tokens is this

right here. Real money, fake models,

deceptive model claims, and shadow APIs.

If we go down here to page two, we see

the following. Alarmingly, our

experiments reveal significant

performance inconsistencies between

shadow APIs and the official APIs. On

high-risk medical benchmarks like

Med-QA, the accuracy of Gemini 2.5 flash

model drops precipitously from 83.82%

with the official API to approximately

37%

across all examined shadow APIs. In

other words,

they're saying, they're claiming,

they're showing you right here, "Hey,

you're going to get Claude Sonnet 4 6."

Now, you might actually just be getting

haiku. Maybe you're just getting Gemini.

Like, you don't actually know what

you're getting underneath the hood, and

this is really how they start cutting

those costs down. The other obvious one

is stolen credit cards and all that that

are used to pay for a lot of these

Claude Max plans that they're able to go

and run for some small amount of time

before they get caught. So, those are

effectively free money. But, the one

that I hate to say, the one that I can

already hear right now, Dario going, "I

knew it!" is that they take the data.

Cuz here's the thing, is these transit

stations, real people are trying to

solve real problems. Whether the real

problems are good or not is not up to

debate. It's that they're solving real

problems, and that means these question

and answer pairs that are coming back

out, these are real problems and real

results from high-end models. American

models, Frontier, Soda, all what is Soda

Deez Nuts? I'm not even really sure what

all that stuff means. But, nonetheless,

that's what's happening. So, they can

take these question answer pairs and

sell them to these Chinese labs to be

able to develop these open-source kind

of 6 months behind models. And this is

where the real money's at. This is where

the real gold is at. Is that these

transit stations actually get the best

thing of all, which is real data from

American companies. The good stuff.

Okay, this is pure, unadulterated Opus

4. They even probably got a little bit

of Fable. How much do you want to bet?

They probably even got a little taste of

that Fable.

But, now it's time for my theory. My

theory for how they make even more money

with all this. Now, you've probably seen

these tweets throughout the time talking

about how all these users of Twitter,

there's literally like thousands of

these tweets where they show like, "Oh

my gosh, oh you know, after like one

prompt, my weekly limit's completely

gone." And you're sitting here thinking

like, how how is Claude that bad? Like,

why would you pay money for that? Like,

all these people on the internet are

just so angry about usage limits. Like,

I wonder if there's there's something

wrong. Well, then you think about, well,

wait a second. What about Shai Halud

that happened, you know, about a year

ago? Shai Halud was a worm in NPM that

would self-propagate and steal all these

tokens.

And then you had Shai Halud 2, you had

Shai Halud 3. Really, what you're seeing

is that there's all these vibe victims,

as I like to call them, that have no

idea how computers

work and have been told over and over

again, "Hey, bro, you're a software

engineer now, okay? Your programming

language? English. Go get 'em, tiger,

okay? Yeah, you probably need like five

Claude Code Max subscriptions. Yeah, no,

no, you totally got this. It's totally

normal to run into your weekly limits

all the time. You got this, bro. Go get

'em. Go get 'em." And all of this just

like massive worm nonstop getting your

system hacked by these completely insane

dependency graphs that exist out there

that if you want to even just say hello

world on a website, you need to go and

download tens of megabytes of

JavaScript. Crazy, right? Like, I don't

know what times we live in, but that's

what's happening. Also, you got like

Arch Arch is constantly getting hacked

these days. PyPI? Oh, PyPI is hacked

these days. Like, everywhere you go,

every single one of these

ecosystems of package managers are just

fraught with worms and deception. And

so, how much do you want to bet there's

an entire class of people that are

effectively have their computers acting

like little mini VPNs for these transit

stations. Oh, you have Claude Code up?

We're going to spawn another little

Claude Code in the background and do a

little piece of work. Okay, hey, thank

you, not a big deal. Have fun with your

weekly limits, not a big deal. Right?

Like, they don't they don't want to

abuse it. They don't want to get it

taken from them. All they need to do is

just do it sometimes, just a little bit.

Hey, bro, just a little bit, you know,

like when the person's already active.

So, in case their session runs out, it

feels kind of crazy. I am completely

convinced that this is happening right

now, that there's millions of requests a

day that are through people's laptops

that they don't even know about because

they're software engineers now, okay?

And NPM's totally reasonable ecosystem.

So, there you go. That is the clawed

black market token 70 to 90% off. It's

absolutely wild out there. I'm going to

include a bunch of sources inside the

description. Go check them out.

It is an in-depth enterprise that's

going on. The name is the primogen.