A black market for access to Anthropic's Claude AI is flourishing in China, according to a report from Wired highlighted by Techmeme.
At the center of the trade are what Wired describes as "transfer station" sites. These services buy Claude API tokens abroad — where access is permitted — and then resell or distribute that access to users inside China, who otherwise cannot reach the product directly.
The workaround economy is a response to tightening controls. Wired reports that as Anthropic clamps down on access to Claude in China, users keep finding new ways around the restrictions. Beyond the transfer stations, the report points to proxy services and fake accounts as additional methods people are using to get in.
The dynamic is a familiar one: a company restricts a product in a particular market, and demand simply reroutes through intermediaries. Each time Anthropic closes one door, the report suggests, another opens.
The brief facts available here come from a single source, and the deeper details — pricing, the scale of the trade, and how Anthropic is responding technically — sit in the full Wired article rather than the summary.
Why it matters: the story shows how hard it is for an AI company to wall off its tools from a market that wants them, and how quickly an informal supply chain can spring up to meet demand that official policy tries to block.