Claude token resellers are undercutting official Anthropic API pricing by staggering margins in China

Claude token resellers are undercutting official Anthropic API pricing by staggering margins in China

Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China. Users need a VPN to access either, and Chinese bank cards won't work for payment — so most people who want Claude simply buy through a reseller. Those resellers are offering tokens at 70–90% below official Anthropic API prices, pulling it off through pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and selling model output and reasoning chains to Chinese labs. The business model runs deeper still: resellers subsidize access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, then sell that data as training data. One reseller is currently offering Opus at a 93% discount below official API rates. Anthropic has introduced identity verification in an attempt to slow the flood of bot accounts behind it all.

Gobble's Take: At 93% off, the discount isn't the product — the user data is.

Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

Sebastian Mallaby's new book traces DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the man behind both

Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine chronicles DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis's pursuit of artificial general intelligence — the breakthroughs, the setbacks, and the innovations that led to AlphaFold and Hassabis's 2024 Nobel Prize. For anyone who wants to understand AI through its most consequential achievement to date, the fact pack frames it as essential reading.

Gobble's Take: Most AI books are about the models. This one is about the person who refused to stop until the models mattered.

Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• AI is finally doing the math — and the math checks out
• AI governance was never just a triangle — and the shape is shifting again
• Telecoms are hauling the AI economy's freight and billing for the postage