[HN]score: 0.37

Chinese Resellers Arbitrage Claude Max Accounts at 70–90% Discount

June 24, 2026

Chinese token resellers are pooling Claude Max 5x accounts and reselling API capacity at 70–90% below Anthropic's prices, with tens of thousands of bot accounts involved. Alibaba is accused of using model outputs to distill Claude capabilities into competing models. Anthropic introduced identity verification to slow the bot account volume.

HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU

●

founderIf you're building on Claude, this explains recent identity verification friction and signals Anthropic will tighten API access controls further.

●

investorAnthropic's revenue integrity is under pressure from large-scale API arbitrage; identity verification is a countermeasure but enforcement at scale remains unproven.

●

policyWorth watching as a case study in model distillation via terms-of-service circumvention — a gap current AI governance frameworks don't cleanly address.

read original ↗reuters.com

← back to feed