Chinese resellers are selling Claude tokens at 70-90% discount from API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs.
Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China, so token resellers are the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China.
Resellers have tens of thousands of bot accounts doing this. This is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bot accounts.
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.
>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs.
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" that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
fwipsy 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
nonethewiser 6 minutes ago [-]
Thats pretty crazy. This kind of thing jeopardizes Claude Max.
avaer 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
epsteingpt 7 minutes ago [-]
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?
3 minutes ago [-]
paxys 5 minutes ago [-]
Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.
walrus01 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
teravor 4 minutes ago [-]
> Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
why would anyone do that? you do realize the laptop farm case was work computers?
the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
globalnode 1 minutes ago [-]
that explains why theyre blocking me. i have privacy controls up high and they must think im a chinese residential proxy bot
bagels 5 minutes ago [-]
They probably asked claude how to do it.
walrus01 16 minutes ago [-]
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...
breput 12 minutes ago [-]
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."
walrus01 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
seanmcdirmid 9 minutes ago [-]
Apple gave Xerox the right to buy $1 million of pre-IPO stock before the meeting took place.
taneq 12 minutes ago [-]
“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!”
nonethewiser 8 minutes ago [-]
You can’t just equivocate crawling websites with building bleeding edge LLMs what the fuck
paxys 1 minutes ago [-]
The websites, music, movies, books, photos, art that they stole didn't spontaneously pop up. 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.
epsteingpt 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
nonethewiser 2 minutes ago [-]
All of this supports the fact that models arent essentially just web crawling
walrus01 6 minutes ago [-]
"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.
nonethewiser 4 minutes ago [-]
So why was there crawling in 1998 but no LLMs?
amazingamazing 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
HaloZero 4 minutes ago [-]
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
seany 7 minutes ago [-]
I can't even come up with a reason to find it wrong.
thadk 1 minutes ago [-]
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?
drillsteps5 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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).
appplication 25 minutes ago [-]
Being logically consistent isn’t as profitable as being aggressive and loud.
BigTTYGothGF 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
randomboy3423 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
tonyoconnell 5 minutes ago [-]
The narrative is moving towards KYC
zakkl 5 hours ago [-]
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.
verdverm 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
ninefathom 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
12 minutes ago [-]
jrflowers 4 minutes ago [-]
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’”
andai 9 minutes ago [-]
We have Claude at home!
ProAm 8 minutes ago [-]
Says the company that is involved in the largest copyright heists of all time to build it's product.
zb3 20 minutes ago [-]
If true then Alibaba is doing us a public service, good job, I hope this extraction was successful.
gaiagraphia 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
DrewADesign 9 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. Get bent dude. Entitled messiah complex jerks.
rvz 5 hours ago [-]
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.
re-thc 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
skeledrew 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
youknownothing 9 minutes ago [-]
laughs in ironic
Pxtl 18 minutes ago [-]
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"
DrewADesign 6 minutes ago [-]
“Hey! Haven’t you heard that two wrongs don’t make a right?!”
- Entitled jerk that initially wronged people
Rendered at 01:12:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Chinese resellers are selling Claude tokens at 70-90% discount from API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs.
Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China, so token resellers are the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China.
Resellers have tens of thousands of bot accounts doing this. This is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bot accounts.
Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 at a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude
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 story a few months back, but it never got any traction https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
>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" that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
This also sheds a very different light on people saying that competitive open-source models are undermining frontier labs' business model.
Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
"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...
"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."
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.
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.
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.
Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?
Should be fun.
Edit: clarification
Anthropic's actions seem performative. Others have already speculated on the likely audience(s).
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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’”
LOL!
Get a grip, son.
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.
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.
- Entitled jerk that initially wronged people