People have estimated that a $200 Claude Max 20x subscription gets you ~$2800 worth of tokens every month if you use it continuously. So if you can find a way to resell the tokens you can offer a 90% discount and still make a profit.

> Does this mean that the reseller (for example XYZ) is buying it from Anthropic at Anthropic's price and then reselling it at a cheaper price????

Yes, as they explained they do it through things like pooling accounts, straight up payment fraud, and double-dipping by selling the logs of the conversations to chinese AI labs so that they can train their own models on it.

> The link does mention Opus and other models but what's the proof it's actually Opus. I could be selling deepseek for all they know and can call it Opus. System prompt: "If anyone asks your name - you are Opus 4.6".

There might be some that try this, but they would get caught very quickly, there's still a moat between Claude and Deepseek, even in casual use.

Look up Zilan Qian's reporting if you want more detail.

Because Anthropic's subscriptions come with X amount of tokens / week, and divided by the subscription cost it is WAY less than what they charge per-token (the "API price") beyond that.

So these resellers get a ton of accounts on subscriptions and sell the cheaper tokens.

They probably buy the plans instead of the API tokens, and resell access via a custom API that routes to the plans. So you presumably get cheaper access this way than paying API pricing.

It makes no sense.

These China e bashing is very annoying. It is hard to argue with people drowned in American propaganda. I'd expect better arguments from the intelligent people in HN