Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwa3592 | Hacker News Reader

>>Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices.

Can someone with more understanding dumb it down for me please.

Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price???? why would XYZ offer this at a loss like that when they could just offer it at Anthropic's price???

The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".

View on HN

People have estimated that a $200 Claude Max 20x subscription gets you ~$2800 worth of tokens every month if you use it continuously. So if you can find a way to resell the tokens you can offer a 90% discount and still make a profit.

yes

> Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price????

Yes, as they explained they do it through things like pooling accounts, straight up payment fraud, and double-dipping by selling the logs of the conversations to chinese AI labs so that they can train their own models on it.

> The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".

There might be some that try this, but they would get caught very quickly, there's still a moat between Claude and Deepseek, even in casual use.

Look up Zilan Qian's reporting if you want more detail.

Summarizing for you: Anthropic is a stupid company that let everybody steal their tokens

Not really sure what else they can do, between people running residential proxies (embedded in cheap games or for a tiny sum of crypto) on their phones at home, making the source of the traffic indistinguishable from legitimate traffic, to ID verification check completion as a service in low-income countries, there isn't much they can do to block it.

They could run their service at a profit?

No customers at that price point though.

> No customers at that price point though.

Oh, no!

Anyway.

Behold the mindset of an individual from a low-trust society.

“x is stupid because y was smart and did z shady/illegal things at their expense, if x was smart they wouldn’t be susceptible to y going to great lengths to exploit them ergo it’s deserved”

> “x is stupid because y was smart and did z shady/illegal things at their expense, if x was smart they wouldn’t be susceptible to y going to great lengths to exploit them ergo it’s deserved”

I honestly can't tell if you think this sentiment is expressed by the US AI companies or the Chinese AI companies.

This gives off "The last line of Orwell's Animal Farm" vibes.

Because Anthropic's subscriptions come with X amount of tokens / week, and divided by the subscription cost it is WAY less than what they charge per-token (the "API price") beyond that.

So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.

They probably buy the plans instead of the API tokens, and resell access via a custom API that routes to the plans. So you presumably get cheaper access this way than paying API pricing.

It makes no sense.

These China e bashing is very annoying. It is hard to argue with people drowned in American propaganda. I'd expect better arguments from the intelligent people in HN

Reply on news.ycombinator.com