Beijing 'Transfer Stations' Resell Claude Access at 70-90% Discount via Gray Market

Six of roughly 30 tenants in a single Beijing office building in the Haidian district are operating as "transfer stations," reselling access to Anthropic's Claude. These operators forward requests from Chinese developers to Claude via overseas accounts and collect payment in RMB through WeChat or Alipay, offering tokens at 70–90% below official prices.

Pricing and Supply Chain

The gray market sustains these low prices through bulk-registered accounts and fraudulent activities. Operators farm free API credits, exploit corporate discounts, and purchase accounts using stolen card details or USDT-funded cards. Some subdivide $200 Max subscription plans across dozens of users. One benchmark indicates a rate of 1 RMB per US dollar of API credit.

Model Substitution and Data Harvesting

A significant risk for buyers is model substitution. Customers paying for premium models like Claude Opus may receive responses from cheaper Anthropic tiers or domestic Chinese models such as Qwen, which are relabeled as Claude. Additionally, reports indicate that these proxies harvest users' prompts and outputs to resell as AI training data.

Enforcement Context

Anthropic previously identified approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts linked to Chinese labs, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, in February. Despite these enforcement efforts, the Haidian gray market continues to expand.