man seems like this entire thread invited a bunch of ads for exactly the thing talked about in the article
can't they detect if someone is reselling their tokens like this ? doesn't seem too hard
The AI Credit Resale Economy
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#52A 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 $…
Or API rates are their way of doing price discrimination and it's all profitable. Make sure Enterprises(tm) pay the Enterprise(tm) rate, but mop up the rest of the demand too at lower price points. This has been part of the software playbook for decades.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#53"My rough estimate is that, across the sites, forums, and resellers I looked at, there are probably tens of millions of these credits being offered." Yeah very useful statemenet it's not like everyone spends hundreds of millions of tokens per day on the 100 or 200$ plan
This was poorly worded on my part; I meant in terms of dollars, not tokens.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#55There'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.
Any situation where you can extract a benefit from a stolen credit card and then sell that benefit before the chargeback renders it moot will have some fraud-based usage.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#56Wait 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
I don't risk being hacked if I buy some stuff on vinted.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#57Wait 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'd rather trust a third party with no reputation than a well known Misanthropic company led by a man whose wife was asking Epstein for investment. They are even less trustworthy then ClosedAI.
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#58Wait 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.
It's really common in China where OpenAI and Anthropic models are firewalled. There was a joke that Chinese people didn't realize how cheap DeepSeek was, because they already were using resold ChatGPT/Opus tokens at that price.
Here is a more detailed article about how it works:
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#59that one platform is using a flipped chroma logo - chroma has nothing to do with this racket (source : i’m chroma’s ceo)
Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy
#60The reseller could use an intermediate proxy and modify the traffic like in [1], to get control of the client machine - depending on the harness permissions. TLS terminates at the proxy (say, https://reselltokens.ai ), end to end integrity is not enforced. LLM traffic contains tool calls like "bash ...", which are executed on the client machine, they can be manipulated. Secret exfil is also possible. [1] https://arxi…
Nice, he can help fix my Linux Bluetooth audio issues.