Many Chinese developers ‘cross the line’ using Claude and Gemini

“Claude’s output is usually very accurate,” a programmer surnamed Song in Hangzhou, who frequently uses the American model for complex engineering processes, told SMCP. “Even when the instructions aren’t completely clear, it can still perform the task well and rarely needs fixing errors afterward. The Chinese model still crashes frequently, sometimes generating code for things I never asked for.”

Models from the US such as Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini are limited in China, but a “gray market” is emerging. In particular, the service uses “hidden API”, which allows forwarding API application programming interfaces to help local developers access leading foreign AI models.

In effect, this “relay station” is routing access to the overseas AI model through a proxy server located outside of China. This method is considered to be the top choice for developers who want to use American AI for tasks such as programming, debugging and image creation.

For example, on some Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao or Xianyu, intermediary service providers advertise copyrighted Claude Opus access, unlimited Claude Code subscriptions, and a 1:1 official model with no performance loss. Most advertise support for a million-token context window, VPN-free home network access, and compatibility with tools like Cursor, VSCode, and OpenClaw. One seller on Xianyu even completed more than 2,200 orders in a week.

Many forwarding platforms advertise API prices lower than the official price. For example, KoalaAPI offers access to GPT-5.4 for $1.50 per million input tokens, while the list price is $2.50.

A Beijing-based service provider surnamed Zhang received 1,000 orders for Claude’s relay service with an 83% positive rating, even building its own relay server farm after becoming frustrated with unofficial service interfaces that were unstable, often causing speed limits or distorting long conversations.

Theo Tom’s Hardware“transfer stations” operate publicly on many platforms such as GitHub, Taobao and Telegram. However, researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany) tested 17 proxy services from China and detected fraud. For example, proxy access advertised as “Gemini-2.5” scored only 37% on a medical benchmark test, while the official API scored nearly 84%. Or when a user wants to use Claude Opus but can get feedback from a cheaper model like Sonnet, Haiku or Qwen, with the output being fraudulently relabeled.

Meanwhile, according to research published by expert Zilan Qian of Oxford China Policy Lab early last week, API proxy services in China even resell access to Anthropic’s Claude for 10% of the official price. Specifically, upstream operators mass-register Anthropic accounts by taking advantage of free API credits, exploiting enterprise discounts, or splitting $200 Max subscriptions across dozens of users. According to Qian, some accounts participate in the system without a fee, purchased with stolen credit card information.

Around the world, relay infrastructure services are gradually becoming popular. For example, in early May, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun announced on X that he would launch his own AI relay platform. Soon after, WLFI, a US-based cryptocurrency company, announced a similar service called WorldRouter, promising to provide access to more than 300 global AI models through a unified API interface. However, they also face increasingly strict restrictions imposed by model development companies.

With the Chinese market, Anthropic is also being more aggressive. Since September last year, the company has increased API access restrictions for most models, requiring phone numbers, foreign payment cards, and non-Chinese billing addresses.

“Before mid-April, relay services were still relatively easy to use,” said Zhao, who specializes in selling Claude API access through second-hand marketplace Xianyu. “After that, account locking becomes much more serious, especially the identity check (KYC) step. Once the account is locked, the registration fee stored in it is considered lost.”