China's Black Market for Claude Access Is Booming

Anthropic keeps locking down Claude access in China. Chinese users keep finding ways around it. A thriving underground economy has emerged to bridge the gap.

So-called "transfer station" sites are purchasing Claude API tokens from outside China and redistributing them domestically. It's a full-blown gray market pipeline — buy abroad, sell at home, repeat.

The workarounds don't stop there. Proxy services route traffic to dodge geographic restrictions. Fake identities, sourced through Telegram channels, let users bypass verification entirely. Every time Anthropic plugs one hole, another opens.

The cat-and-mouse game highlights a fundamental tension: demand for frontier AI models doesn't respect borders. Chinese developers and researchers want Claude badly enough to build an entire shadow infrastructure around getting it.

Anthropic hasn't commented on specific countermeasures beyond its existing access policies.