In early June, Anthropic publicly released Fable 5, a safeguarded version of its most powerful AI model to date, Mythos. Chinese social media immediately lit up with posts from people sharing their impressions after trying it out. Anthropic revoked access to the model worldwide a few days later in response to export controls imposed by the Trump administration.
Anthropic's aggressive barriers against Chinese users
Chinese people generally can access other Western AI tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, by using virtual private networks, foreign phone numbers, and international payment methods to create and maintain their accounts. But Anthropic has taken more aggressive steps, such as banning accounts that it suspects are owned and controlled by people located in China. On Chinese social media, users frequently report that they have been suspended from Claude without warning, despite taking those precautions.
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The underground economy for Claude accounts
This cat-and-mouse game has fueled a thriving underground economy for Claude access in China. Accounts are sold on Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao and through illicit marketplaces on Telegram. More recently, a cottage industry of "transfer stations" has also emerged. These services act as intermediaries, purchasing access to Anthropic's API outside China and then redistributing Claude API tokens to users inside the country. The setup is designed to give startups and other professional users more stable and reliable access to the AI assistant.
Identity verification and the battle against workarounds
Michael Aciman, a spokesperson for Anthropic, says that the company uses a range of evolving detection systems, including identity verification, to enforce its policies against unauthorized access to Claude. He added that Anthropic has also worked to detect and disrupt proxy networks used to provide access to the chatbot in China. In April, the company rolled out identity verification for some Claude users. The process is handled by Persona, a third-party company, which requires users to upload a government-issued photo ID before they can log into Claude. IDs from unsupported countries won't count, and failing the test can lead to a ban.
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Fake identities and black markets on Telegram
The requirement, which some Chinese users have compared to Know Your Customer verification, shifted the workaround market away from Claude accounts and APIs toward fake identities. Over the past few months, according to Hieu Minh Ngo, a reformed criminal hacker turned investigator, Chinese-language Telegram channels have begun advertising fake IDs. Similar marketplaces have popped up on Telegram over the last few years. On websites and Telegram channels, users market what they claim to be Claude Pro and Claude Max accounts, alongside others for ChatGPT Plus and Gemini Plus. These underground Chinese-language marketplaces particularly focus on selling "pro" accounts, which allow greater numbers of prompts to be sent.
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The gap between Chinese and Western models for coding
Despite all the difficulties Chinese users are forced to overcome to use Claude, the assistant remains highly popular in the country, especially among programmers. Even though Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Z.ai have some of the most capable open-source large language models, third-party tests still show that they lag behind leading closed models like Claude. During a recent reporting trip to China, WIRED spoke to academics and engineers at multiple tech companies who said that they preferred using Claude over Chinese models to generate code. Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, noted that Chinese software developers overwhelmingly prefer tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex compared to domestic tools. "Analysis shows that Chinese models are still six to nine months behind the US models, and for specific things like coding, the gap is obvious," Qian says.
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For insights on token efficiency in AI, read our article on MRAgent's token reduction and the Tata Electronics data breach. To understand the broader AI landscape, check the Wikipedia page on Claude.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/how-people-in-china-keep-outsmarting-anthropics-geolocation-restrictions
