They are almost certainly paying orders of magnitude less than a billion dollars. According to another comment, they instead buy tokens resold from subsidized subscription accounts, which is against Anthropic's TOS.
replyWell, anthropic can just catch these and cancel their subscription - what's the problem?
replyIt's almost like websites also have their robots.txt files that anthropic blatantly ignored. What's the problem, that now a US company is getting out-venture capitalismed by a Chinese company?