Taobao sellers buy Claude proxies 96–97%

Posts on May 17 circulated claims that Chinese marketplace sellers were offering proxy access to Anthropic’s Claude models at discounts of about 96% to 97% to official prices. The claims centered on Taobao and Xianyu, two Alibaba-operated marketplaces that have already been identified in recent reporting as venues for “shadow API” listings tied to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Anthropic’s own documentation shows first-party Claude API prices far above the levels described in those posts, while the company also says mainland China is outside its supported regions. The result is a market in which demand, price gaps and regional restrictions are all visible at once. ### Where did the May 17 claim come from? A May 17 post on X, referenced in the story prompt, said users were buying Claude access through Taobao and Xianyu proxies at roughly 96% to 97% below official prices. I could not independently verify the underlying marketplace listings tied to that specific post from the materials available online today, so the exact discount figure should be treated as an unverified social-media claim. (scmp.com) South China Morning Post reported on May 10 that relay providers on Taobao and Xianyu were advertising “native Claude Opus access,” “unlimited Claude Code subscriptions” and “1:1 official models without capability reduction.” The report said one Xianyu seller had fulfilled more than 2,200 orders and advertised “low-latency, no-VPN” access to the full Claude 3.5 suite. (grok.com) ### What is verified about Claude sales on Taobao and Xianyu? SCMP’s May 10 report said listings for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini access remained common across Taobao and Xianyu, and described the services as relay stations routing requests through proxy servers hosted outside mainland China. The report said sellers promoted support for Cursor, VSCode and one-million-token context windows. (scmp.com) The Times of India, citing the SCMP report on May 11, said those listings promised “no-VPN” access and support for coding tools, and repeated the claim that one seller had handled more than 2,200 Claude-related orders. That account does not independently establish the 96%-97% figure, but it does support the broader point that an active resale market exists on those marketplaces. (scmp.com) ### How far are those claimed prices from Anthropic’s official rates? Anthropic’s pricing page, crawled today, lists Claude Opus 4.7 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3 and $15, and Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1 and $5. Anthropic also lists separate pricing for prompt caching and notes that all prices are in U.S. dollars. (timesofindia.indiatimes.com) A discount of 96% to 97% would imply users were paying only 3% to 4% of those official rates. That math is an inference from Anthropic’s published pricing and the social-media claim, not a figure confirmed by Anthropic or Alibaba. ### Why is there a proxy market at all? Anthropic’s supported-regions documentation does not list China among the countries and territories where it currently supports API access. (platform.claude.com) Anthropic said in a September 4, 2025 notice that its terms prohibit use in certain regions and specifically referred to companies from “restricted regions — including adversarial nations like China” accessing its services through other means. SCMP reported that Chinese developers use these relay services to bypass restrictions and reach overseas AI models for coding, debugging and image generation. The paper quoted a Hangzhou-based programmer surnamed Song saying Claude’s coding output was “usually very accurate” and required fewer bug fixes than domestic alternatives. (platform.claude.com) ### What are the main uncertainties in the discount story? The May 17 posts did not, from the sources I could verify, establish which Claude models were being sold, whether the access was API-based or subscription-based, or whether the services delivered the official model advertised. SCMP reported that Anthropic had tightened account enforcement last month and said several resellers told the paper the business had become harder to operate. (scmp.com) The same reporting also said some providers in this market can swap in cheaper models or route requests through layered intermediaries, which makes headline discount claims hard to compare directly with Anthropic’s first-party price sheet. That means a 96%-97% figure, even if attached to a real listing, would not by itself prove like-for-like access to Anthropic’s official service. (scmp.com) ### What should readers watch next? Anthropic’s supported-regions page and pricing page remain the clearest public benchmarks for whether marketplace offers match the company’s official terms and rates. Alibaba’s Taobao and Xianyu listings, if they remain live after May 17, will determine whether the discount claims can be independently checked against named sellers, order counts and quoted prices. (platform.claude.com) (scmp.com)