Chinese Token Resellers Offer Unauthorized Claude Access While Labs Extract Model Reasoning

A thriving gray market of Chinese resellers is circumventing Anthropic's access restrictions by offering Claude API tokens at discounts of 70–90% below official prices, enabling undisclosed model-distillation campaigns that have extracted nearly 200 million exchanges of user interactions. The operations, documented by The Information and detailed in Anthropic's September 2026 threat report, illustrate a persistent cat-and-mouse dynamic: as Anthropic tightens controls, resellers develop new workarounds ranging from stolen credentials to shell companies to overseas subsidiaries.