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Claude has become in the most desired model by the most demanding developers and engineers, but it is not available in mainland China for regulatory and safety reasons. The demand there remains notable, and to satisfy it, an underground token economy has emerged that allows local developers to access models such as Claude Opus 4.7, avoiding all the measures imposed by the blockade. No paying with Alipay. One of the measures that Anthropic imposes to prevent the use of its models in China is to only accept international credit cards such as Visa or Mastercard. Their payment gateways reject local payment methods like Alipay or Wechat Pay, giving Chinese users a first and important hurdle. One that they have already overcome. Virtual cards. What they are doing in China to overcome this problem is using virtual credit cards (VCC) like DuPay or WildCard. With these services it is possible to obtain Hong Kong or US credit cards financed with cryptocurrencies or through local transfers. This makes it possible to deceive the billing systems of Anthropic and other companies that offer banned services to Chinese users. SMS verifications They are also solved through “SMS farms” that also avoid this problem and even others such as identity verification that also have implemented in Anthropic. The “Transfer Stations” arrive (中转站). Another problem is that even overcoming that first barrier, latency and micro-cuts mean that the use of Claude in China is affected by continuous connection problems. To avoid them, so-called “Transfer Stations” have emerged, which are nothing more than servers that act as a bridge between foreign servers and Chinese users. These gateways receive requests from China and forward them to Anthropic servers as if they were coming from an authorized location. The latencies are also relatively low, which means that for Chinese users the experience is basically identical to that of a user in the US or Spain, for example. These stations are publicly known and do not only appear in listings on GitHub: there is a ranking with the best. Claude is almost free in China. The surprising thing about these methods is that they don’t just give Claude access in China: they do with ridiculous prices which can be 10 and even 5% of (growing) original price of the service thanks to those transfer stations. The question, of course, is how it is possible to access Claude at those prices. The almond tree trick. Thanks to the transfer stations, developers can access Claude at a price of 1 yuan for every dollar of tokens, or in other words, up to a 90% reduction in the official price. It is something that is discussed publicly and that makes it clear that several methods are used to achieve this: Mass purchase of capacity, Use of accounts created with stolen or fraudulent cards, Use of promotional credits, and A simple hook: providers lose money with Claude, but they manage to attract developers to whom they then sell more profitable local models like DeepSek. Am I really using Claude? One of the growing risks in the cheap token market is direct fraud. Some Chinese resellers have been caught red-handed offering what they call the “Claude API” when in reality what they were providing were much cheaper and mediocre models. For a user to detect this type of deception it’s very difficult unless you are working with complex tasks or you have already used models and know more or less what to expect from them. For victims, the effect is clear: they believe they are paying for the intelligence of Opus 4.7 when in reality they are receiving answers from a low-end AI model. Goodbye to privacy. When a user purchases tokens at one of these transfer stations, they completely give up the confidentiality of their data. All queries and responses end up passing through the intermediary’s servers, which can and apparently does use them to sell them to AI companies that use them to post-train their models. So everything they do and say when using these models is filtered and used as training data without the user knowing. A double business. For these providers, this business of reselling conversations is especially interesting in the face of the famous “distillations” of US models that take advantage of this data to “copy” the capabilities of those models and apply them to Chinese models. Anthropic can read us, but (theoretically) it doesn’t. It is true that the conversations we have with Claude (from Spain, for example) are also stored on Anthropic’s servers, but the company makes it clear in your privacy policy that does not use that data. In fact, we can even explicitly prohibit the company from using them in the privacy settings of Claude’s account. The game of cat and mouse. At Anthropic they know very well what is happening and they are trying to prevent it. For example, they have begun to intensively block IP ranges associated with VPN services or data centers known to be used in these transfer stations. Even so, Chinese providers usually respond with an “elastic” architecture that allows IPs of domestic residences to rotate, making the traffic appear completely normal. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | There is a thing called “Ornn price index”, it is out of control and it is bad news for everyone