This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
However, I don't really mind China "stealing" from Anthropic. For us consumers we are getting the cake and eating it too. I.e we are getting rapid improvement to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in funding, yet the market remains big enough that there's a chance of it not ending up as a monopoly in 20 years. And venture capital are footing the bill. A part of their investment is practically being redirected to fund Chinese AI development. It lets us live out our lives as happy CAC farmers[1].
So I would argue its not as much of a "cheaper solution" as it is intentionally and maliciously abusing another company's product to extract more value than the billing plans intend (given an average user), and further subsidizing the product by selling this data to competitors. But I don't necessarily think its a bad thing for us end-users. Nor for the market. But it is bad for Anthropic and its investors.
Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs
At this point this is being repeated so often that completely uninformed users are taking this at face value.
I understand why - the distillation narrative casts Qwen as a poor copy of a superior model, and cultivates ground for political lobbying for bans. That doesn't make it less dishonest, but I suppose profits trump ethics.
In my economics classes, we were told that (in a "free market" argument) the best thing to do if a subsidy is making something you want cheaper is to use it. You're getting your thing, and at a reduced cost.
(I'm not really replying to you per se, I'm curious how "free market" folks in these comments would respond to this.)
This narative that the CCP is just subsidizing all business to "beat america" is just dumb. Its the build process being made cheaper by the government. Not the final product.
The CCP is the Chinese AI labs.
I am not aware of any US government AI labs (besides perhaps a small spattering of national lab research or the like)
There is very large difference that your either need to be poorly informed or purposely driving an agenda to miss.
Just because Xi Jinping lets companies play mock "private businesses", does not mean there actually is private business. At the end of the day, the CCP still has final say in everything, and Xi has final say in the party. There is no constitution (in the US judges swear to the constitution, in China they swear to the party), and there is no balance of powers.
It's just one guy, running experiments the way he see's fit.
You mentioned propaganda, take heed.
> It's just one guy, running experiments the way he see's fit.
This is moronic. Exercising a degree of control does not equate to making every decision and running every organization.
Also, obviously Xi doesn't make every decision. No dictator ever did that because it's impossible to do. The distinction is that no one has ever (or has the ability) to over rule what Xi decides. So if Xi has a stroke and wants DeepSeek to start manufacturing underwear, they will be ordering sewing machines tomorrow. Any sense of "private" is a farce.
It did not stop solar panels getting cheaper and cheaper because of the whole integration and mass production (with healthy free market competition).
The last subsidies like export value-added tax rebates for solar panels and lower rebates for batteries are ending in 2027.
China their main power is, the ability to have everything inhouse. Yea, they subsidize a lot of stuff until it hits critical mass, and then you have often a healthy industry with lots of competition.
China alone has like a few 100 car manufactures because of the subsidies, and over time there will be consolidation / buyouts etc but the end result is a healthy new industry that exports. With again, everything internally being produced.
This is why our subsidies fail. We do one sector, often a few companies at best. This results in few competitors, expensive prices, and often reliance on externals that can bankrupt those companies. And que how we wasted again dozens of billions in propping up a industry with no competitive edge.
People can cry about China but they are actually doing work, despite the mass amount of corruption. That is the big difference with here... Mass corruption got in the way of national security, plop, people go to jail. Industry quickly gets their ** together. Here ... give billions, and the money vanishes, with no real consequences.
Local governments are over-funding numerous producers (though cheap loans and other subsidies and incentives) creating excess competition. This is an ongoing problem and is a huge misallocation of capital. Increasing demand just drives this process harder and puts downward pressure on margins. As soon as they try raising prices, or just through satisfying total demand, demand collapses and they (almost) all go out of business.
The Chinese model has weaknesses, we should be exploiting them.
There are a bunch of forces that drive the Chinese economy, and right now growth is slowing sharply. Their dictatorship and semi-planned economy will ultimately be their undoing.
So basically like US companies subsidizing offerings with selling user data, ads for crypto scams, manipulation for elections, making people addicted to gambling and so on?
Seems fair and an improvement as you can choose between that and not. Unlike say offerings from Meta where the data selling and efforts to further gambling addiction is always included.
Because all of that is considered totally okay when every single US big tech company does it.
Chinese research outout, publically released, has also contributed in big ways to features present in every single US model. Yours is a bit of an unfair take I'd say.
Besides, claude will think its chatgpt sometimes, so clearly this isn't a problem restricted to china, turns out unethical companies will do unethical things /shrug
Why? Lots of people try this tactic, but hardly anyone ever succeeds. Meanwhile, the customer benefits.
Specifically, examples of people later exploiting their monopoly to charge people more than they otherwise would have paid.
That's, uh, pretty much exactly how oligopolistic markets function.
> I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
Well, to have free market you need to remove as much barriers to enter the market as possible. Huge capital investments required for entry and intellectual property laws are two examples of such barriers. Subsidies kinda supposed to help alleviate the first one.
So, the least Anthropic can do is pay it forward.
In that sense (which could very well be bogus), letting a company violate individual IP of basically every human is less of an economic concession and more of unconsented to IP open season.
Even if one were to drop "economic" from "economic concession" and instead view a subsidy through the lens of a more general concession, one could say that the US Govt gave US AI companies a legal concession to sidestep the copyright protections of other US entities. But the US Govt should only get to undermine the copyright protection of other US entities - who gave American companies the right to violate the copyright of non-Americans?
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.
This is not the right deduction.
China blocks foreign AI from operating there.
Given the current US government's tightening of export control restrictions and the introduction of a bipartisan bill to block use of Chinese AI in federal agencies, I'd say the two countries' positions are not far apart.
https://apnews.com/article/ai-china-united-states-competitio...
Chinese AI apps like DeepSeek are freely available for ordinary Americans to download and use. There's no federal law banning private citizens from using them.
So to claim that Chinese companies are better at selling American companies' work than the American companies can do themselves when they are prohibited from operating in that market, is the wrong deduction to make.
Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market!
Anthropic profited from training its models on all kinds of copyrighted information, live by the sword, die by the sword...
Their model weights, training data, training methods, etc are all going to leak to China over time.
Nobody on a site named _Hacker_ news should be all that upset about this.
I would assume China is working on liberating Anthropic weights through the battle-tested strategy of finding someone in a privileged position and getting them laid, etc.
Care to elaborate on your side or should we just leave it there?
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.
>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.
US courts have consistently ruled it's fair use.
>US courts have consistently ruled it's fair use.
And they also have ruled that the that output of an AI isn't copyrightable.
As such copying claudes output isnt even fair use as that is an exemption to copyright but the same as copying public domain work which any and all are allowed to do.
… with a license that only allows you to use it for certain purposes, subject to certain restrictions.
> and the seller is really selling a random 25 character string, which can hardly be copyrighted.
1. Copyright is about creative works. It is possible to have a meaningful creative work no more than 25 characters long (or equivalent). Music is particularly good at this.
2. The key itself is not copyrighted (it’s not a creative work), but is reasonably interpreted as a copyright circumvention device. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number.
Like Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations “‘Free market’ is when a company receives a favorable ruling about copyright in the United States”
Yes, they are fine? They might no longer include full first party support by Microsoft for not being "new". Same as buying a used car (also comes with the "shady sites" for a far longer time).
Though this not making any difference by Microsoft not doing any support either way to make more money is a business decision by Microsoft.
In the context of LLMs, monopoly rights haven't been created (yet anyway).
Fun fact: for a period the US (or american colonies) didn't have copyright but Europe did, so people could copy and sell English (and other) books for free.
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.
It's supremely ironic analogize distillation to copyright infringement when it's literally what Anthropic was found guilty of. It's not illegal to distill. It is illegal to pirate. And it's what Anthropic was found guilty of, not Alibaba.
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
So it's more like one bootlegger sold the DVD for $20 and their competitors are undercutting them for $1. Who's the bigger thief here now?
Capitalism as intended!
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.
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.
And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year.
I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.
Turns out I was wrong, I just hadn't read something funny enough yet.
> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
This deserves to win HN comment of the year 2026.
The majority of the NASDAQ market cap is a direct result of the US subsidizing and dumping its goods on the rest of the world en masse.
such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading.
globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty, it was designed to extract excessive values from those poor countries in the first place. painting globalism as something noble is naive at best.
globalism was the theme of world trading for the past several decades, it was available to all nations. care to explain why other nations in poverty failed to be lifted by the exact same fancy globalism?
let me help you on this one - China was THE leading technological and economical force of the vast majority part of human civilisation. What happened between 1840 and 2010 (the China in poverty period) was an outlier of the history. Globalism didn't lift China from that poverty, the ability to lead the human civilization which was embedded into the Chinese DNA did that.
Kid, when our Chinese ancestors wrote the Art of War, your ancestors were still swinging on trees. You just missed that big picture.
Yes, so the kettle is calling out the pot?
> globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty
It doesn’t matter what it was designed for. What matters is what it does in reality and there is no doubt that globalism helped lift China from Mao’s disastrous policies. That’s not mutually exclusive from China’s past as the Middle Kingdom
An example of a country which didn’t do that is Nigeria. They got something like $300B in oil revenue over a 30 year period but have actually seen significant increases in poverty, now at 70%.
same with US corn on Mexico and other central american countries, creating all those migrant problems in north america.
wooo, americans subsidizing and dumping poor quality goods
As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.
You're being beaten by a Chinese company? Why improve your own process when you can just lobby for sanctions and tariffs instead!
For a brief second, Germany was in a position to become a solar power global player. But our conservative government was more interested in protecting their local, bad industry. Including destroying forests for coal all projections said we would never actually need.
The main advantages the Chinese car industry has right now are: they lead in battery R&D, production is highly automated, they iterate quickly, Chinese work culture is extremely competitive and things get done fast, and the Chinese state has policies to promote EV adoption, so there's a huge domestic market.
Note that the last point is different from subsidies to car manufacturers. Cities made it difficult to get license plates for ICE cars. The government encouraged the massive buildout of charging infrastructure. And it used consumer rebates, like California did.
but it's also thanks to protectionism, and their strictly controlled (not freely traded) cheap currency.
if china had to play by the same rules as japan or germany it would not be quite as successful. but the west walked into this trap, hoping their win-win proposal would be satisfactory for all. now the west is too dependent on chinese production to enforce equal standing.
of course the US has its own unfair advantages, e.g. the global reserve currency and the massive post-WWII headstart.
Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service.
David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics.
“The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
These people don't get that academics publish their research in openly available journals. They go to conferences around the world and tell everyone who will listen exactly what they are working on. Unless you're working in a secretive government weapons lab, there's nothing to hide.
In the US, people like Mr. Vigneault instituted a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese researchers, and ended up messing with the lives of all sorts of innocent people, including the director of MIT's mechanical engineering department. They found zero spies. Just a bunch of scientists working normally.
Dumping is selling goods below cost.
Usually because government is subsidizing part of the production. I don’t believe the word “dumping” is used for the similar process when Venture Capital is subsidizing it, but using the same term would make sense.
Price at home vs abroad does not matter.
This is not what is happening here. Chinese manufacturers are making a large profit off every car they sell in Western markets. As I said above, they're selling these cars at several times the price they charge in China. Unless you believe these cars are being sold at just 30% of cost in China, there's no way Chinese companies are selling below cost in the West.
Chinese cars are not sold below cost in Western markets. So it is not dumping.
I've been doing so for years. How about you join me today. I already see two other users doing the same, so there'll be at least 4 of us.
It's blatantly dumping, whether the source of the money is directly the government (those in power) or VC (mostly US billionaires (trillionaires?), in other words, those in power) is a trivial implementation detail.
The US is a net importer, not exporter. It needs to absorb trade at a deficit to encourage the use of the US dollar as the reserve currency.
We import goods, we settle in surplus dollars. The world runs on those dollars.
If the US starts dumping on various industries (how is it even primed to do this?), then the world reserve currency status comes into question.
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.
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.
Wait, so your pitch in favor of a debt-fueled market economy is that advertising is awesome and that we wouldn't want to "lose" being smothered in ads all the time?
Cause... sign me up for the non-financialized, non-mass-media-advertising-driven economy please and thank you. I'd even be ok with just nuking billboards and mass-media forms of ads and still allowing more direct forms of marketing, if we must compromise! Likely we could find some compromises around just how much of the debt world we regulate too (this should be obvious?).
(I thought the disconnect between the efficiency of competition and the market as realized in modern economies was pretty well understood and taken for granted, but I guess we all find ways to justify the system we're profiting from... even if that means we have to claim we love the ad breaks)
The point is that if add random caveats to what counts as free market, it won't be "free market", only "market I like".
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.
While these are hardly shy claims, I don't see anything in them to say "only the West does irresponsible loans"?
> 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.
or the prior post
>Usury and debt based economy creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to financialistion.
> 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.
You can throw a rock these days and find a category where the products coming out of China are miles ahead of those coming out of the rest of the world, from a bunch of companies nobody had heard of a few years earlier. And the list is growing pretty steadily.
I would assume plenty of shortsighted decisions are also being made. But I would have a hard time characterizing the state of competition in the west as healthier or more productive when looking at the number of players and the quality of goods being produced in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...
Financier want monopoly so use usury for Consolidation. Monopoly bad because no free market. Free market good. consumer happy. citizen free.
It’s even more speculative and detached from productive behaviors.
It is good and proper that people aim to create monopolies, as long as they want to do that in a productive and legal way! Monopolies are inherently dangerous, but the truth is that acquiring and maintaining one is not straightforward unless you can get the government to ban your competitors.
Different mechanics, but stripping everything away, roughly the same.
as a borrower who's not allowed to compensate for your lenders' risk monetarily, your access to loans is severely restricted. Essentially you have to rely on your extended family. and instead of paying for the risk with interest payments, you have to pay with loyalty and subservience.
it restricts social mobility far more than the western model. it incentivizes clan structures. which incentivize cousin marriage.
power concentrates in the patriarchs of a million little family kingdoms. which causes all kinds of economic inefficiencies.
in the US, even if you're born without any family connections, as a healthy 20 year old you can find a job (hard work) that allows you to save $70k per year and invest it. when you're 30 you have $1M and a good credit history, you can easily leverage that to get a $2M loan at low interest rates, which allows you to start any kind of productive venture you want.
and you can do all this without owing your clan's patriarch access to e.g. your most profitable clients, or your daughters hand in marriage to his retarded son, or anything else he wants in exchange for his generosity.
Islamic trade is certainly one of the best models out there but I think in many cases in practice it is still applied subversively.
It is not enough to ban mechanisms like usury, designed and intended to exploit.
One has to go after the very subversion of legitimate practices for illegitimate goals.
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.
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.
It's fundamentally about enabling things and largely middleman-type stuff. I have a hard time imaging what "At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to." would even look like? What are you doing with that AI power, and who is paying for the output and why?
Elon probably isn't gonna spend that much on a model that can generate him ever-better fake porn but does nothing that he can use to sell stuff to other people. Especially in a world where open models are "good enough" for many things like "tell me how to fix the plants in my garden that are dying" and the like. What remains in the narrow knowledge-work space of: can't be done by an individual or small group themselves, but is valuable enough that it would make sense for people to hoard access to these extreme frontier models? Try to recreate Hollywood-as-a-monopoly by becoming the single content producer for everyone's individualized feed and so owning all the advertising budget in the world? Seems hard, we've already seen how easy it is for cheap-and-crappy-but-addictive-or-funny content to disrupt traditional media.
(There's also pure scientific research, but historically that's not very directly connected to "massive profit" and has a habit of leaking out and getting productized most effectively by other people or just being really easy to copy once someone shows how it's done.)
Robotics could be a different story, as physical labor can be more inherently productive, but "reasoning" advantages are unlikely to be a big long-term differentiator there. At some point the brick laying robot is satisfactorily building the structure, and you're good.
A huge amount of the value of "the economy" and the power of a currency is driven by circulation of money, and one thing that all the "bullshit jobs" white-collar/service-industry work does is keep the money moving and ensure that a lot of people have some good-or-services of value to exchange. If you take away the ability to offer services worth exchange from huge chunks of the economy in these super-frontier-models-replace-everything scenarios... you're gonna have a bad time?
Model improvement is already hitting diminishing returns, and people aren't willing to pay substantially more for a slightly better model. There's no "accelerating away" when the new models don't open up a huge new market. If anything, the companies burning huge amounts of money on marginal improvements will be undercut by companies happy to sell current models at a significantly lower cost.
The model has to be sold for cheaper than the value it adds.
Or your customers will bleed out financially.
EDIT: rethought entire premise.
Of course, such a state of affairs is temporary at best -- since the alternative is so lucrative!
Ah yes, systematic fraud and protectionist practices, free market through and through.
True freedom in the market means the freedom to capitulate your wealth to snake oil salesman and schemers who operate on generational timeframes until economic power consolidates and renders your society into de-facto tyranny. Before any sort of regulations existed, we were all trading shiny rocks with ultimate freedom, and that somehow has produced a bunch of economic situations in the modern day that a ton of people don't like.
What's more interesting to me is freedom from the need to have investigative journalists doing deep dives into potentially fraudulent, thieving, or scheming companies behind every purchase, and to know that what I'm granting market success to is exactly what my money or time is going towards - I'm not buying something at a loss that funds some other deliberately obfuscated project that's made opaque from my perspective of the market transaction.
The proverbial "market wisdom" doesn't emerge out of markets with extreme information asymmetry.
Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer.
Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider.
Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents.
Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about.
Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity.
Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.
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.
Do you think you can re-stream cable TV or Netflix to your own paying customers at a cheaper price?
I'm curious why you think you cannot re-stream a public domain stream.
You can't re-stream free over-the-air network TV.
That one company with the datacenter full of TV tuners tried and was sued out of existence.
I don't get the moral framework that you're applying. Could you elaborate?
Was it ethical for Anthropic/OpenAI to train their models by gobbling a treasure trove of copyrighted material?
The output of LLMs cannot be copyrighted. This isn't a semantic game; it's literally the case that Anthropic cannot seek relief for people duplicating the output of an LLM.
DMCA can't apply in this case because (this is the "C" in its initialism) it is based on copyright protections, which the output of Claude is not eligible for.
DMCA has as little to do with this as streaming copyrighted content
Ethics are subjective. That’s why we have courts judge based on the law and not ethics
They are:
1- breaking terms of conditions of the service
2- getting banned and creating thousands of accounts to break the conditions of the service at scale
3- using VPNs and proxies (possibly residential) to mask their network origin and identity
4- Using potentially fake names to sign up
5- Using different credit cards?
Fraud on so many levels, a lot of the infrastructure and modus operandi is what cybercriminals use, these are attackers man, whether you like the victim or not, and whether you think it's poetic or not, I recommend compartimentalizing and just trying to gauge whether an act is wrong or not in itself.
> Because users’ inputs and model outputs are mediated through a proxy, users cannot verify which model their request was actually routed to. A user selects Opus 4.7, but the proxy can silently route to Sonnet, Haiku, or, in the worst case, GLM or Qwen, and fraudulently relabel the output. In a recent paper from Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (which cited my article last year on grey market!), researchers audited 17 API proxies and found widespread model swapping–API proxy access to “Gemini-2.5” achieved only 37.00% on a medical benchmark, a staggering drop from the 83.82% performance of the official API. On the user end, the tell only comes on complex tasks, when the output feels off (often referred to as 降智, or “dumbed-down”), but there is no clean way to prove it. Numerous public records highlight concerns that certain API proxies have noticeably compromised model performance. These proxies are suspected of “diluting” (掺水) services by substituting premium frontier models with inferior tiers.
> Besides model swapping, overconsumption of tokens also makes the price per token cheaper, though at the expense of driving up the total cost. Some of it is structural, as proxies that rotate accounts frequently destroy cache continuity as a side effect, forcing users to burn full-price tokens on context that would otherwise be nearly free. Some of it may be deliberate as the proxy providers try to milk more usage. The line between the two is difficult to draw from the outside.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
According to which lawyer caste?
Are American laws absolute truth? If not, who cares?
> 3. At an Italian airport: Constantly stealing bags, opening them to pick out MacBooks and credit cards, a credit card manufacturer-who sells stolen "black" credit card info to transfer stations— is racking his brains to save you money.