You are completely underestimating the scale of what is happening here.
Chinese AI labs are actively facilitating an industrial-scale network of tens of thousands of bot accounts, that resell Claude tokens at 97% below official API prices. They buy subsidized Max 5x plans (sometimes with stolen credit cards), then split the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output. They are running a massive data-harvesting operation. Chinese labs and token resellers subsidize the cost of the tokens in exchange for the API metadata (detailed reasoning traces, model outputs, and tool calls) to use as high-quality training data for their own models.
They are buying Anthropic's own product, just to resell it below cost, just so they can capture the training data. Reportedly, they are paying as much as ~$0.01 per tool call.
You are completely underestimating the scale of what is happening here.
Chinese AI labs are actively facilitating an industrial-scale network of tens of thousands of bot accounts, that resell Claude tokens at 97% below official API prices. They buy subsidized Max 5x plans (sometimes with stolen credit cards), then split the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output. They are running a massive data-harvesting operation. Chinese labs and token resellers subsidize the cost of the tokens in exchange for the API metadata (detailed reasoning traces, model outputs, and tool calls) to use as high-quality training data for their own models.
They are buying Anthropic's own product, just to resell it below cost, just so they can capture the training data. Reportedly, they are paying as much as ~$0.01 per tool call.
https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698
I explained what is happening in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814