Inside China’s Gray Market for Anthropic, Cracks Emerge in AI’s Data Center Financing

Rising bond yields (6% to 9%) and choosier bank lending are squeezing AI data center returns just as China's gray-market demand for US models and looming IPOs add market risk.

• Gray market scale: Thousands to tens of thousands of Chinese mom-and-pop resellers sell access to Anthropic/OpenAI models via fake emails, USDT crypto payments, reverse proxies, and offshore shell companies that buy tokens from AWS or leftover enterprise plans.
• Distillation debate: Jing Yang says Chinese labs distill partly due to US chip export controls limiting compute for original training; an investor compared distillation to athletes doping — short-term gains, long-term harm.

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