A common refrain is that oh there are such great margins on tokens that none of this matters… I wonder how long until that notion will be disavowed? The scale of the tokensnaffling is massive, not just from resale, but also people using multiple subscriptions. The amount of subsidization is only growing, every week it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing “resets” which allow a single $200 subscription to incur $20k+ of usage (if billed at API rates). At some point we must all surely accept that the economics of this do not work.
The AI Credit Resale Economy
41–50 of 141 posts
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#42So are they stealing from their employers or is something else going on?
nope - a.i companies to promote their platforms offer 'a.i' credits to startups usually worth 10ks, 100ks worth of credits in $ terms. so to a startup - you can trade your credits - then get actual cash. just like you would if trading debt etc.
What is the logic behind selling at such a steep discount? Lack of buyers or trust? Seems insane to sell tham at -50% or more, especially since you can use them yourself (if you're a startup)
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expect most of the use to be for bulk data processing or desperate founders who don't care, not for agentic coding use at promising startups. If your startup needs to run a million records of something, especially public data, through an LLM to extract the data you need, using bootleg tokens to shrink the bill starts feeling tempting. If you're concerned about the data leaking, the biggest risk is that the API back…
> to run a million records of something, especially public data, through an LLM to extract the data you need Maybe this make sense, but anyway I have to pay a lot of attention at the output I get. Eg: who guarantees there is no prompt/sql injection? Especially if I have to load the output in some internal system.
Bulk data processing typically has structured JSON output.
I mean someone could try to sneak prompt injection into a text field, but the people buying black market resale tokens from third parties aren’t thinking about anything other than getting cheap output.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#44There's a lot of assertion here and the other article that this fraud and abuse but is there any evidence of that? A simpler explanation is that that this is just a resale market.
From talking with some of the companies experiencing this, I can confirm that a portion of it is actual credit card fraud. Tokens have become a pseudo-currency, making them a prime target for abuse.
Some of the abuse is more benign, but there is also real fraud through chargebacks, account takeovers, and stolen credit cards.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
nope - a.i companies to promote their platforms offer 'a.i' credits to startups usually worth 10ks, 100ks worth of credits in $ terms. so to a startup - you can trade your credits - then get actual cash. just like you would if trading debt etc.
What is the logic behind selling at such a steep discount? Lack of buyers or trust? Seems insane to sell tham at -50% or more, especially since you can use them yourself (if you're a startup)
Risk-reward calculus. A buyer may not take the risk or hassle of going underground only for a small upside. Basically it is not as tempting at 90% of list price, but it is at 10% .
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#46Yunwu.ai was a nice way to get ultra-cheap tokens that someone will probably spy on you with, but they no longer offer US models. At first I thought it was so people could steal the traces, but now I wonder if this isn't just laundering startup credits for dollars.
They were never offering actual US models. We tested them extensively and it was clear whatever they were passing as Anthropic were simply mediocre distillations based on Kimi.
Haha! Incredible. What a scam! Too good to be true, I suppose. I never used it for anything meaningful because everything meaningful is also tragically sensitive so I suppose I didn't notice.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#47The original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market People trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts,…
Another part of the discount is that Claude Max 20x is $200 but gives usage equivalent to thousands of dollars worth of API-based token spend. But also, resellers only need to make an overall profit including kickbacks from the companies purchasing token history for distillation.
It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.
I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#48When "token futures contracts", start selling. Then the bubble is about to burst.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#49"My rough estimate is that, across the sites, forums, and resellers I looked at, there are probably tens of millions of these credits being offered." Yeah very useful statemenet it's not like everyone spends hundreds of millions of tokens per day on the 100 or 200$ plan
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#50Wait a sec, I have to trust a third party with basically no reputation, did I get it right? It's basically asking for being hacked and/or sending you private data to random email addresses! Neither at a 99% discount I'd do it. I understand if someone, for any reason, cannot access a specific model ... But nowadays, there are so many alternatives that even this doesn't make sense any more.
I mean reselling items bought with stolen credit cards have been a thing for at least 20 years