An entire industry has grown up around Anthropic and OpenAI over there. They call them "transfer stations": proxies that resell tokens from Western models. This stopped being a garage workaround for rate limits a long time ago. It's a market with its own economics, and it runs on a few things.
Accounts. These services mass-produce free and Max subscriptions through stand-in registrants and other people's KYC, then wrap them in a pseudo-API.
Model swapping. You pay for the flagship, but your simple request gets quietly routed to something cheaper. Who actually generated the answer? You can't check.
Data. The proxy operator sees all of it: prompts, responses, code, internal context. Even if they never sell the logs, you don't know where those logs sit, who reads them, or whether they ended up in somebody else's training run.
Take Yunwu. By their own price list, access to Anthropic models runs up to 93% below official. The price alone proves nothing. But the market logic is simple: restrictions don't kill demand, they make it more expensive, and they feed the workaround industry.
