Anthropic Combats Sprawling Gray Market Reselling Claude Access to Chinese AI Labs

Thousands of Chinese token resellers are providing unauthorized access to Anthropic's Claude, enabling AI labs to distill the U.S. model's capabilities on an industrial scale. Between May and July 2026, seven Chinese AI companies—including Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot—generated approximately 190 million unauthorized exchanges through proxy networks that relay requests via accounts registered outside restricted regions, according to Anthropic's investigation. This represents a roughly 12-fold surge from the 16 million exchanges documented earlier in the year, signaling an escalating effort to extract the model's technical capabilities despite export controls.