Chinese Labs Bypass Claude Access via Gray Market Tokens

Anthropic checks phone numbers. It checks foreign credit cards and billing addresses. It bans companies more than 50 percent owned by entities in unsupported regions like China, and for some users it demands ID verification with a live selfie. By most measures, that makes Anthropic's access controls the tightest of any major AI provider operating in the Chinese market.

None of it is stopping the trade. Chinese developers are buying access to Claude for roughly a tenth of the listed price, routed through overseas proxy servers that operators call "transfer stations." These setups exploit free credits, swap out expensive models for cheaper substitutes without telling buyers, and pass requests through a chain of intermediaries that makes the whole system hard to trace back to any single source.

Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab, mapped out how this supply chain works in an analysis published by ChinaTalk. What she found raises questions well beyond pricing: about what geoblocking actually accomplishes, and about what else slips through the same cracks once a determined gray market gets built around a product designed to be locked down.