Cheap Claude Tokens in China: The Transfer Station Economy, Explained A new essay by Zilan Qian looks at China’s “transfer station” economy: an API proxy ecosystem that routes Claude requests through overseas servers, helping users access Anthropic models without direct registration, foreign cards, or official API billing. The system has formed a layered supply chain: account sellers, SMS platforms, payment channels, proxy networks, KYC services, API proxy operators, developers, enterprises, app builders, and secondary resellers. The most striking part is pricing. According to the essay, some transfer stations offer Claude tokens at 70–90% below official prices through account arbitrage, quota resale, Claude Max subscription splitting, possible model substitution, and potential monetization of user logs, including prompts, outputs, tool calls, code context, and reasoning traces. The broader takeaway: This is not just about China-US AI competition or model distillation. It highlights the limits of geoblocking, phone verification, credit card checks, and biometric KYC, and raises wider questions around AI safety, data privacy, traceability, and the unintended markets created when access to frontier models becomes restricted. #AI #Claude #Anthropic #DataPrivacy