How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China - by Zilan Qian

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How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China<br>The Transfer Station Economy, Explained<br>Zilan Qian<br>May 05, 2026

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Zilan Qian is a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.<br>On April 23, 2026, the White House released a memo warning that Chinese entities were running “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns against American frontier AI models, leveraging “tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection. In February 2026, Anthropic similarly reported on Chinese labs’ coordinated distillation attacks using “a single proxy network managed more than 20,000 fraudulent accounts”. Both cases see “proxy” — the middlemen between model users and model providers — as a purposeful design by a selective Chinese frontier labs to systematically extract US AI models.<br>Regardless of whether Chinese labs rely on distillation to “catch up”, both documents misread the proxy economy they’re describing. Underneath the handful of labs sits a much larger market, one that has been operating in public on GitHub, Taobao, Twitter, and Telegram. It is a grey economy of API proxies (commonly called “transfer stations,” 中转站) that lets Chinese developers access Anthropic’s models at as low as 10% of the official price. The participants extend far beyond selective experienced AI researchers, and the motivations are much broader than building a frontier model to catch up. Everyone who wants to use more advanced AI models or tools, be they university professors and students, tech workers, individual developers, or hobbyists, uses API proxies.1 The logs they generate may have become a commodity, traded for purposes ranging from model training to targeted fraud.<br>Meanwhile, every layer of control frontier US AI companies have added (geoblocking, phone verification, credit card requirements, and now live biometric KYC checks) has produced a corresponding layer of evasion infrastructure. These new SMS farms and biometric harvesting operations have implications that extend beyond geopolitics into how frontier AI safety frameworks are designed.<br>Building on my 2025 ChinaTalk piece on accessing banned American models in China, this update zooms in on the transfer station economy specifically: how it is structured, how it monetizes, and what it reveals about the limits of access blocking and account monitoring as AI governance tools. Unlike 2025’s grey market, however, the 2026 story does not stop at the border between Chinese users and American AI model providers. The transfer station economy exposes blind spots in AI safety frameworks designed to prevent harms that extend beyond the US-China rivalry, from misuse by malicious actors to the erosion of provider traceability, while feeding into criminal markets that exploit ordinary people — many already disadvantaged — caught in the supply chain.<br>To illustrate how a transfer station works, let’s take Anthropic, the company with the most rigorous geo-blocking mechanism, and whose models are very popular among Chinese developers, as an example.

A meme circulated on the Chinese internet: “Do you think you are smarter than Claude?”<br>Geo-blocking and Know-Your-Customer (KYC)

On the map of Anthropic’s supported countries, China is conspicuously absent, and on the Chinese internet, so is Anthropic – technically speaking. In reality, neither Anthropic’s blockage nor the Great Firewall stops Chinese users from accessing Claude and Claude Code. Claude models have thrived on e-commerce apps like Taobao despite supposed platform and government censorship since 2025, and Singapore, with a population smaller than that of New York City, “surprisingly” leads global per capita use of Anthropic’s Claude in April 2026.

Chinese developers joked about the report that Singapore is the top token consumption of Claude on Twitter, implying that this is because the Chinese are routing to Singapore to use the model. “We are all Singaporean from time to time.” “Every day I self-assign my nationality.” “Isn’t it because we all use Singapore’s node?” “Seems that many companies are using Singapore’s node.”<br>The Chinese government is not today especially motivated to curb Chinese developers’ access to advanced US models. Anthropic, on the other hand, is serious about it, with its multiple layers of mechanisms to block users in mainland China. At the most basic level, account registration requires phone numbers, overseas credit cards, and matching billing addresses. On September 5, 2025, Anthropic further prohibited access from any entity more than 50% owned, directly or indirectly, by companies headquartered in unsupported regions like China, regardless of where that entity operates. This closes the subsidiary loophole that had allowed Chinese-backed firms in foreign countries to retain API access.<br>The most recent measure arrived...