[Certhas]

TOS violations are not espionage. Everybody who links up Claude to OpenCode is violating the TOS.

So from the largest industrial espionage in history we have left "They paid for the accounts but violated the TOS". And then you randomly add the claim they stole the money to pay for the accounts.

You have provided no evidence other than "Claude tokens are sold for cheap in China". As others have pointed out, that might also simply be counterfeit tokens generated by open weight models.

The western labs have established the precedent that all data they can buy beg borrow or steal is fair game. Turning around and crying foul when the Chinese labs follow their lead is hypocrisy.

[tristanj]

Have a read of this detailed article, it's well sourced and documented that token resellers are logging the Claude outputs and selling them to Chinese labs. All your points are addressed in there https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

I linked it earlier, but it seems you didn't see it.

re: labs purchasing model/tool output, see https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235

re: model swapping, sure some providers may swap models, but there are many that don't, see https://www.hvoy.ai/en for a list.

[Certhas]

First off, I don't doubt that China engages in large-scale industrial espionage, or at least used to. Nowadays they have plenty of talented and highly educated engineering talent of their own.

Second, I now actually read the article. It describes plenty of questionable and problematic things but also contradicts your claims explicitly.

The essential point of the article is about making money by selling access to Claude cheaply in China. Not about Chinese labs orchestrating a way to get their hands on Claude output.

Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article: "[Beyond this there are] accounts purchased using stolen or fraudulent credit cards [...]. How large this share is relative to the above four “innocent” tactics is difficult to verify, but the two markets likely share some infrastructure and personnel.". Instead, swapping models to cheaper alternatives is listed as a major reason for cheaper prices.

Then the article gets a key point wrong: As many others have pointed out to you, you don't get access to the reasoning traces anymore on the subscription accounts. And the article also clearly states:

"Chinese developer communities assert [selling logs] is happening in at least some cases, but whether proxy operators are systematically harvesting and selling these logs, and to whom, remains unverified. However, downstream distillation data does exist on the open web. Several datasets of Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning outputs circulate on HuggingFace with no clear source for the outputs. Theoretically, one can clean and sell similar distilled datasets to other model developers in China."

The article also discusses selling logs for other (far worse!) purposes than for training, like blackmail.

So overall this article reads very, very different to your claims. Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks". Instead it paints the picture of a naturally emerging grey-market response to access control blocks, consisting of many exchangeable individual actors: "Almost no one operates the full chain. Most participants own one or two links and monetise those well, resulting in a resilient, modular system."

Importantly: Nothing in any of this looks ethically worse to me than Meta using pirated books for training. And nothing suggests that OpenAI or Anthropic were more ethical than Meta when sourcing their material.

[tristanj]

> Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks"

Did you read the correct article? This is covered in the first paragraph:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

It directly addresses large-scale, coordinated 'distillation attacks' orchestrated by Chinese labs, which Anthropic accuses of exfiltrating tens of millions of exchanges. The rest of the article elaborates on how this is done. Specifically, how these labs use transfer stations mix in genuine user traffic to conceal the distillation.

> Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article

I only mentioned payments fraud because you asserted without evidence that Anthropic is actually getting paid for these tokens.

You wrote, without providing any sources, that these proxy services are "buying the product" and that "They paid for it!"; and used that as justification for their behavior.

My counterpoint directly invalidates that assumption. While perhaps not every single reseller relies on fraud, you blindly generalized that these proxy services are all legitimate, paying customers.

In reality, the industry exists on shady practices. As detailed by this industry insider https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 , these operations routinely:

* Use botnets to mass-create thousands of accounts

* Blatantly violate ToS by splitting and reselling account access

* Use fraudulent identities to create thousands of bot accounts

* Bypass KYC by recruiting real people in low-income countries for biometric face-matching checks for a few dollars

* Use AI deepfakes to fake passports / verification credentials

You can't claim they "They paid for it!" when the entire system is built on systematic fraud.

[jrflowers]

I enjoy your detailed breakdown of how exactly they pay anthropic for access to their models but I am unclear about how “I think they’re bad” means that they didn’t pay for it

Can you elaborate on “it doesn’t count as a sale if I don’t like them even if I accept the money and give them what they paid for”? Like if you work at a gas station and you realize that the guy that just bought a hot dog bullied you in middle school do you call the cops?

[Certhas]

I read the article you linked:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

I know that Anthropic claims that "large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks"" exist. They are not a disinterested party here and they don't provide evidence either.

Also you're just moving goalposts around. The article you linked also cites Anthropics claim but then paints a much much mor nuanced picture.

[oneshtein]

Chinese labs are BUYING data? WTF? They should just steal it like American labs.