China's Underground Market for Access to Anthropic's AI Model

Anthropic goes to great lengths to prevent people in China from using its AI models, but in practice, its safeguards have often failed. Over the past year, startups, researchers, and tech enthusiasts across the country have developed increasingly sophisticated workarounds to access Claude. Many of them consider it the world’s most capable AI assistant, making the extra effort to obtain it worthwhile.

In early June, Anthropic publicly released Fable 5, a safeguarded version of its most powerful AI model to date, Mythos. Chinese social media immediately lit up with posts from people sharing their impressions after trying it out. Anthropic revoked access to the model worldwide a few days later in response to export controls imposed by the Trump administration.

Chinese people generally can access other Western AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, by using virtual private networks, foreign phone numbers, and international payment methods to create and maintain their accounts. But Anthropic has arguably taken more aggressive steps, such as banning accounts that it suspects are owned and controlled by people located in China. On Chinese social media, users frequently report that they have been suspended from Claude without warning, despite taking those precautions.

The cat-and-mouse game has fueled a thriving underground economy for Claude access in China. Accounts are sold on Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao and through illicit marketplaces on Telegram. A cottage industry of “transfer stations” has also emerged.

These services act as intermediaries, purchasing access to Anthropic’s API outside China and then redistributing Claude API tokens to users inside the country. The set up is designed to give startups and other professional users more stable and reliable access to AI assistant. Michael Aciman, a spokesperson for Anthropic, says that the company uses a range of evolving detection systems, including identity verification, to enforce its policies against unauthorized access to Claude.

He added that Anthropic has also worked to detect and disrupt proxy networks used to provide access to the chatbot in China. Despite all of the difficulties Chinese people are forced to overcome to use Claude, there remain many loyal fans of Anthropic in the country. It’s especially popular among programmers.

Even though Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Z.ai have some of the most capable open-source large language models on the market, third-party tests still show that they lag behind leading closed models like Claude. During a recent reporting trip to China, WIRED spoke to academics and engineers at multiple tech companies who said that they preferred using Claude over Chinese models to generate code, and are eager to try out each new model that Anthropic releases. Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, looked into the black market for reselling Western AI tokens to Chinese users.