💀 The “cheap Claude API” market is apparently one giant AI scam machine.
Anthropic charges around $15 for a million Opus tokens. Meanwhile on Chinese marketplaces, “Claude Opus” is being sold for $1–2. Sounds amazing… until you realize there’s a good chance you’re not even getting Opus.
Researchers found that nearly half the time, these services secretly swap in weaker models like Haiku, GLM, Kimi, or Gemini Flash while pretending it’s Claude Opus. Performance reportedly drops hard, but most users never notice.
The setup is wild:
• $5 VPS servers running open-source Claude proxies
• Thousa
Anthropic charges around $15 for a million Opus tokens. Meanwhile on Chinese marketplaces, “Claude Opus” is being sold for $1–2. Sounds amazing… until you realize there’s a good chance you’re not even getting Opus.
Researchers found that nearly half the time, these services secretly swap in weaker models like Haiku, GLM, Kimi, or Gemini Flash while pretending it’s Claude Opus. Performance reportedly drops hard, but most users never notice.
The setup is wild:
• $5 VPS servers running open-source Claude proxies
• Thousa
