LOL!
Get a grip, son.
Gosh, overusing accounts running up unplanned-for expenses?
Kinda reminds me of...overusage charges and inflated expenses clients have had to deal with because Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, etc have been "illicitly extracting" everything they can grab from said websites, as fast as they can. In what amounts to a DDOS, frankly.
Whether if it is true or not, this is part of their effort into using them as an example to scare everyone into getting congress to ban powerful models from being accessed outside of the US and also banning powerful local models from being released.
Anthropic does not care about you, and they are not your friends.
In other words, they want to sell Fable or future more powerful models to rest of the world (presumably all future models are going to be more powerful than current gen). One way they can sell this is to the government is by scapegoating China (which is their primary concern anyway).
This is working on the presumption that non-US companies form a material portion of their current revenue.
If it was just "that easy" then I doubt only "Chinese models" would be doing it and we'd already be packed with competition.
Distilling might be a thing but it isn't a free win.
So that was the real reason for the Fable restriction? Because Anthropic wrote a letter to the US government saying that China was distilling Fable?
“Anthropic, red faced after unattended ice cream cone eaten by ants on park bench, once again demands government pick it as forever winner, adds ‘no take backsies’”
- Entitled jerk that initially wronged people
/Anthropic-probably
That's not the point. Why is it a country thing? There are plenty of non-China startups in this space having resources at that scale. The "China" has resources is some "Western media narrative" speak. So Meta should have won a long time ago? Or xAI?
> culture (Asians are generally collectively-inclined, so sharing is in their core)
Just stereotype it? So we've gone from China -> "Asian"? Then where is your Korean or Japanese model etc? And somehow you know they're sharing.
> political bent (there will be no diplomatic repercussions) to put up a fight
More inferring from "Western media news"?
Where's the reality?
The media hyped up Gemini / Google TPU free-win last year. How did that go?
Because the China vs US geopolitical situation is a thing. Meta is a social media company, not an AI company, and they direct their focus as such. xAI just never got serious traction so now they're selling their compute. Also if a US company were caught distilling, I think Anthropic could actually take them to court, and I'd guess they don't want that kind of PR.
> Just stereotype it?
Is China not Asian? Are Asians not generally collective/cooperative, as opposed to individualistic/competitive?
The "and" that joined those 3 items is very important: it means you can't pull them apart and address them independently as they each contribute to the context. I'm not too sure about Korea, but in a way Japan is a US colony in all but name. Both are very much politically intertwined with the West (along with RoC/Taiwan), which means nothing major that may be against US interest happens.
The reality is that China and the US are essentially in a trade war, where the latter is trying its best to keep the former in the Dark Ages, because "national security", but the former is refusing to take it lying down and continues to make progress regardless[0], because they have the resources and will.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/news/china-lineshine-supercomputer-to...
Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing them to operate below cost.
Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China. You need to use a VPN to access either, and you can't pay with a Chinese bank card. So most people who want access to Claude buy access via a reseller. It's the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China.
These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots.
Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 at a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?provider=Anthropic
This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.
I shared this story a few months back, but it never got any traction. It explains the token resale economy in China, it's an excellent read https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win.
Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?
Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!
And, gotta say, the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious. There might be an economic study here somewhere about just how anti-consumer and anti-progress their IP laws turned out to be. We've got an entire postindustrial revolution centred around who can ignore the most stupid laws.
When it comes to favorite companies of the tech communities, it's almost always "Rules for thee, but not for me"
The standard stance is "they can do no wrong and they are absolutely perfect". I mean, look at any thread with anything about Apple in it.
Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.
In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
This post is so delusional and dripping with condescension I've read it three times and I still can't figure out if you're trolling or not.
This one does not make sense to me at all.
Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.
Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.
>Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude
But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.
So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.
If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.
This also sheds a very different light on people saying that competitive open-source models are undermining frontier labs' business model.
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/claude/articles/chinese-grey-marke...
Once people realize they can access Anthropic models at a 90% discount, they won’t want to pay full API prices anymore.
Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
> Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?
the answer to your question is containers/VMs + residential proxies
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".
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.
So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.
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
This is one seller I found, they're reselling "real Max 20x subscription accounts", at ~97% below official API prices https://funpay.com/en/lots/offer?id=70812310
Note that whoever you buy from will be able to read all your tokens, so don’t use it for anything confidential/financial.
Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way.
I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility.
Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless.
So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function,
f(text) -> (text_transform)
According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function.
Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product.
I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process;
Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.
Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered)
You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google.
You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians.
It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out.
And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos."
Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please."
Just saying.
This is almost standard practice in any competitive industry anyways. Disassemble your competitor's product, study it and try to reproduce / improve.
"you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"
Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
Claude used TB of content without permission to train their model and it was ok for them. Now someone else uses the output of a Claude model to train model and they cry foul.
The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainly what the Chinese labs are doing, since it has a much better effect on the end result than just getting simple answers to simple questions.
These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is, because they want the USG to block/ban Chinese model providers as protectionism. They have already called for more export controls on chips (which is funny because DeepSeek v4 was designed to run on Huawei chips and now the other Chinese providers are following suit). But they can't come right out and say that, so their claim is that they're asking for more export controls because distilled models might not be as safe as their own. But if you show them a jailbreak of their model that bypasses their safety, they'll tell you that any model can eventually be jailbroken so don't worry about safety.
Should be fun.
Edit: clarification
It's about the same valuation as bun, lol.
Anthropic's actions seem performative. Others have already speculated on the likely audience(s).
Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway.
It's over.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying foul for another entity doing exactly what they all did?
Hilarious.
It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:
If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are
shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids,
potable water, sewage services, fire departments,
and police departments?
I think Anthropic is just marketing / bluffing, because they don't even have the data.
They do distill the models, but they don't go to Anthropic, they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform.
This is actually the only way that what Anthropic is alleging would make any kind of sense. And, as a matter of fact, is exactly what every enterprise does to train models.
This kerfuffle should be interesting to watch.
But, as always, everyone (in the US) should fully download all the Chinese models while you can. I suspect this may be the "Phantom Menace" they use to render illegal our use of Chinese AI tech just as they've rendered illegal our use of Chinese cars. Only difference is, we peasants may need the Chinese AI tech to have any chance of competing with Big Tech in the future.
And even with the Chinese tech, as Big Tech spreads their AI out into more and more niche areas, we'll likely still not be able to build startups that can compete with them.
It's just that without Chinese AI tech, we'll have no chance at all.
Complain/brag that chinese firms are illegally using the models and bypassing export controls.
Be surprised when your model gets banned by the government.
This combined with no implementation of KYC makes it seem like they want to find a middle ground with Fable where its off of export controls but they promise to prevent China and specific others from using.
Obviously their actions are going to be fiscally motivated at the root, but sussing out how they intend the precise dynamics to play out is more nuanced.
Thinking of this as an effort to woo the defense hawks cuts a very clear path.
Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?
Sweeeeeeeet.
or is this just about the token reselling?
According to which lawyer caste?
Are American laws absolute truth? If not, who cares?
A voLTE call is like 40kbps. For every person on earth to be on the phone to another person would be 4 billion calls would be about 160tbps. Which is less than 10% of the Internet's capacity.
It's similar to fractional banking, you gamble that people won't want their deposits all at once and pray for you're big enough for bailouts when they do.
It's still a business whose fundamentals don't make sense, you're just gambling you won't get found out.
It's not so much keeping it secret as counting on no one finding a way to harvest the subsidized value at scale. There's an example of that occurring in game consoles with the Playstation 3. Sony's little-used OtherOS feature allowed Linux to be installed on the PS3 and the Cell processors were quite a good deal for scale compute. So the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory bought ~1800 PS3s and ganged them together in a datacenter as a supercomputer called Condor.
At >500 TFLOPs it was the 33rd fastest supercomputer in the world. Of course, Sony pushed a firmware update that removed the OtherOS feature entirely.
Why would customers knowing that the vendor prices goods/services at a loss cause those strategies to fail? Customers often know. Most know about razors and blades; many/most know Lyft/Uber operated at a loss to gain market share. etc.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83).
I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.
Both Anthropic and Alibaba are trying to build bleeding edge LLMs. That part is the same. The way they source their data is slightly different, but they would both argue it constitutes fair use under Copyright law.
Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.
LLM's literally wouldn't work without the sum total of knowledge (in the forms of books and other copyrighted content) being used as 'training data' for these LLMs.
The 'bleeding edge' LLMs required many things, but: 1 Tech innovation ('attention') 2 Lots of compute 3 Data 4 Pre + post training
#4 doesn't happen without #3.
It's pretty obvious at this point that the major providers have stolen vast amounts of #3 - they have paid nearly 0 of the creators.
We can argue about the impact (I'd lean net good) vs. the cost. But arguing there isn't a cost is a bit silly.
But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics.
Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing proliferation through distillation is considered more important.
[1]: See the notes on distillation in https://dualuse.dev/posts/export-controls-on-fable
And Berkeley’s “False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs” found imitation closes the style gap fast but there is a large capability gap.
For example, GLM 5.1 is more capable at pentesting than the model from which it is alleged to have been distilled [1].
Intuitively, this makes some sense: you can "distill" from multiple frontier models, and you can further post-train the distilled model. But I'm not sure exactly what happened with GLM 5.1.
[1]: https://dualuse.dev/posts/chinese-models-are-sometimes-bette...
Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).
literally nothing but given that the Chinese already did it and the models are published what's the point. You can thank the Chinese taxpayer for subsidizing the electricity bill and just download the thing
But with this, I don't have an issue. There is no theft since what is being used is the exact product that is being delivered. Yes, it's breaking the ToS, but ToS are generally bullshit. Anthropic surely broke thousands of ToS or other legal terms while it was scraping for content to train on. Which is why they had to pay $1.5B
And that's just as a basic first effort reject measure to prevent automation tools from using things designed for human-interactive use only.
Go try to do many of these things from Cogent IP space and see how long your project lasts.
I'm curious how that comparison controls for Opus refusing (whether explicitly, or just deciding not to pursue a path) given the caption below the first image:
>A perfect score means the model autonomously found and exploited the vulnerability.
I'm not really suggesting that it's misleading, but wondering if I'm missing something. Otherwise I guess it seems unsurprising that you can distill a better-performing model [in specific focused areas] by simply not distilling refusals?
For that eval, I used an account that was labeled as a known red-teaming org by Anthropic, and I read the traces. There were no refusals or obvious avoidance behaviors, though it may have been silently nerfed.
On the same eval, Opus 4.7 and 4.8 outperformed GLM 5.1, but GLM 5.2 is on par again with Opus. So it's at least partially measuring capabilities without respect to refusals.
One possible contributing factor is that model capabilities are shaped differently (an example of this is GLM 5.1 vs. DeepSeek v4 Pro: https://dualuse.dev/posts/deepseek-v4-thinks-different). So if you use RL-based "distillation" from multiple models like Opus 4.x and GPT 5.x, you could get a more capable model.
Random, but are the frontier AI providers like ChatGPT better at searching the Chinese internet now?
When I was in China and asking AI for restaurant recommendations, all the US frontier providers were pretty useless, or plain out hallucinating, even if I specifically ask them to search Dianping (Yelp for China).
For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510
Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.
Is Claude output copyrighted?
If anything, a tremendous amount of Claude’s input is copyrighted.
If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.
Ok, but what about those shady sites that resell Windows education keys? They're certainly a "better experience" than buying legit keys, by virtue of being significantly cheaper. You aren't even really committing copyright infringement in the process, because Microsoft gives out windows isos for free, and the seller is really selling a random 25 character string, which can hardly be copyrighted.
Imagine having such a warchest and being so bad at business, lol.
What added value can Anthropic give users not available to pirating users? That is what they should ask themselves.
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.
And the value-add experiences that utilise LLMs require immense imagination et al that folks at Anthropic will not be able to conceive of - given that they have made immense sunk investments in existing assets. This clouds ones thinking immensely.
Both OAI and Anthropic have tremendous failure risk and this is of course not reflected in the fake private market valuations.
I see a world where lots of stuff is mass produced in china (tokens) but the acutal goods that deliver the experiences are designed, marketed and sold in the west at much higher prices. of course this a nightmare scenario for anthropic et al.
Or is the datacenter IP just one part of the picture?
There's a lot of inauthentic coordinated automated systems these days along the general lines of scraping/crawling/social media manipulation/sockpuppetry that require running through residential proxies or proxies to places that don't look like datacenter IP space.
How does are bans against consensual financial exchanges close to the "ideal" of the free market? It just sounds like you have an axe to grind about the financial system rather than describing free markets.
In short, instead of market being driven by demand and productivity, it is driven by financier curving out monopolies.
Peak Examples are Uber and AirBnB.
Second, marketing can take you only so far compared to the subsidies possible with financialisation.
The West is in a state of psychosis with Debt and Monopolies under the illusion of free market.
The Chinese markets are more free than West, you can just look at the Auto and AI industry.