Claude at 5% of the Price: What Buyers of Gray Tokens Really Pay

Two recent studies, "Token Jacking" by Unit 42 and "Free tokens for sale" by Okta Threat Intelligence, examined services selling access to top AI models at 5-15% of official prices. A typical representative, Poison Claude, offers 'unlimited' plans for models like Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, accepting only cryptocurrency to avoid identity verification. The service pools accounts and routes requests through them, with customers paying 5-15% of official token prices. Goods for such services are obtained via token jacking (stealing developer accounts through phishing or stealer viruses) or farming (mass registration for bonus credits, e.g., $100 AWS Bedrock bonuses). A documented case saw unauthorized traffic generate bills of nearly a million dollars. Buyers include developers from countries where official access is blocked, budget-conscious researchers, and even Chinese military researchers who distilled models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The gray market is partly fueled by high official prices and unavailability in many countries. Buyers face risks: unreliable access (providers can revoke credits without refund), model substitution (CISPA found 17 such services, with tests showing Gemini 2.5 Flash accuracy dropping from 83.8% to about 37% through shadow APIs, and GPT-5 actually being GLM-4-9B), and data theft, as proxies see all traffic and can collect, store, or sell it.