if Ford bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Hyundais, put extra instrumentation in them, and resold them at a discount to customers who agreed to the instrumentation in exchange for the discount, is Ford doing industrial espionage?
At the same time, Volvo is running the exact same hustle, except they buy the cars with stolen credit cards, so they get the cars for free.
1) Anthropic tokens via subscription aren't sold at a loss, they're sold at cost.
2) Subscription plans are not sold in hopes of eventually gaining a monopoly position. They act as a loss leader designed to get a foot-in-the-door and funnel companies into costly enterprise plans, where Anthropic can charge full API rates.
I responded that these resellers don't always acquire these accounts legitimately. They often use stolen credit cards, educational discounts, or resold compute credits to acquire them at essentially zero cost. They're not always paying customers.
That's one reason token resellers are able to price so cheaply, they acquire the goods for free.
Anthropic and OpenAI eat the loss.
Yeah but where are you getting this from? I've seen this claim many places but only as pure speculation. No proof, just bold faced assertions.
1) Using botnets to mass-create thousands of accounts
2) Blatantly violating ToS by splitting and reselling accounts
3) Creating thousands of accounts using fraudulent identities
4) Bypassing KYC by recruiting real people in low-income countries for biometric face-matching checks for a few dollars
5) Using AI deepfakes to fake passports / verification credentials
But if you believe that payments fraud is the one ethical line these syndicates refuse to cross, there's not much else I can say to convince you.