Users are simultaneously paying customers and unpaid data producers, selling their private data to proxy operators in exchange for a low price.
Qian explains how Claude tokens can sell for ten percent of the official price: harvested account credits, shared subscriptions, fraudulent cards, silent model swaps, and the resale of prompts and responses. The interesting part is not that a grey market evades Anthropic’s controls. It is what the price reveals. If inference is sold below cost, the missing margin has to come from somewhere: subsidy, deception, or another product.
Cheap tokens are not necessarily cheap. Sometimes the balance is paid in prompts, source code, and credentials.