[maxglute]

My understanding is there's local API resellers who provide gateway access to bundle claude/openai with other cheaper PRC models via routing to water down price. The resellers are bulk generating pro accounts / trials i.e. basically 100% subsidized by Anthropic/OpenAI. Resellers also sell for cost or below cost because they're intercepting training data to resell. The economics of PRC token is divorced from Anthropic and OpenAi, i.e. PRC gray market tokens are most "efficient" for shadow trial resellers (who basically pays for disposable sign up sim) and least efficient (as in negative sum) for providers who convert none of the subsidized trial accounts into paying.

[himata4113]

Not the same thing, these are actually gateways into opus models hosted on hardware at AWS in china. https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

Also abuse of free accounts/trials wouldn't work since it would destroy cache and it maintains 97% cache rate.