Smuggled Claude: how China buys banned AI

Access to Claude is being sold on Taobao at discounts of up to 90%: this is how China’s “gray market” evades Anthropic’s ban on AI in China and exposes security gaps that no one had described this way before.

In this episode, we explore the “transfer stations” (中转站) that resell Claude tokens through proxies; the recruitment of vulnerable people in Cambodia and Kenya to falsify KYC verifications with live selfies; model-degradation fraud, where you’re sold Opus but receive Haiku; and how this traffic blinds Clio, Anthropic’s anti-abuse system. We analyze whether geographic blocking is an effective measure or merely a geopolitical signal that ultimately creates more harm than it prevents.

If you’re interested in the geopolitics of AI, frontier-model security, and what happens when a company tries to shut the door on an entire market, like, subscribe, and share your opinion in the comments.

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