A 90% discount doesn't come from nowhere. Someone pays for it, and usually that someone is you: with your data, with model quality, or with somebody's stolen account.
An entire industry has grown up around Anthropic and OpenAI over there. They call them "transfer stations": proxies that resell tokens from Western models. This stopped being a garage workaround for rate limits a long time ago. It's a market with its own economics, and it runs on a few things.
Accounts. These services mass-produce free and Max subscriptions through stand-in registrants and other people's KYC, then wrap them in a pseudo-API.
Model swapping. You pay for the flagship, but your simple request gets quietly routed to something cheaper. Who actually generated the answer? You can't check.
Data. The proxy operator sees all of it: prompts, responses, code, internal context. Even if they never sell the logs, you don't know where those logs sit, who reads them, or whether they ended up in somebody else's training run.
Take Yunwu. By their own price list, access to Anthropic models runs up to 93% below official. The price alone proves nothing. But the market logic is simple: restrictions don't kill demand, they make it more expensive, and they feed the workaround industry.
In June 2026 Anthropic accused entities tied to Alibaba/Qwen of a campaign to siphon Claude: nearly 25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million requests in six weeks, to distill their own models. DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax have caught similar accusations before. Same grey access, just wholesale.
But the problem is bigger than China. Even with fully legitimate access, most teams can't answer three questions about their own production: which model actually served the request, what it cost, and whether quality dropped. The grey market just takes that blindness to its logical end.
I think the priorities here are upside down. For a serious product, production visibility and control over your data matter more than a few percent saved on tokens. A 90% discount is worth nothing if you can't see what happens inside a request and can't vouch for where your prompts, your code and your context went. You end up paying for that discount in risk.
So the question isn't really about China. Can you prove which model answers in your production, and what it costs you?