The AI Credit Resale Economy • Hacker News Board

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#101

Post by reaperducer » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 3:46 AM UTC

charlieyu1 wrote: post #50

vb-8448 wrote: post #31

Wait 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

reselling items bought with stolen credit cards have been a thing for at least 80 years

FTFY.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#102

Post by veganmosfet » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

byzantinegene wrote: post #100

veganmosfet wrote: post #22

The 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…

they have no reason to do that to harm their reputation if their goal is profit, in which in this case it is.

sure, but malicious actors could act as resellers and exploit the situation.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#103

Post by loufe » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

The comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business.

Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#104

Post by kay_o » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

loufe wrote: post #103

The comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business. Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.

This is what every chinese "credit reseller" is doing, selling all the prompts and responses to labs in addition to selling quanted kimi/ds/etc as opus/fable

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#105

Post by yetanotherdood » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:22 AM UTC

kay_o wrote: post #104

loufe wrote: post #103

The comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business. Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.

This is what every chinese "credit reseller" is doing, selling all the prompts and responses to labs in addition to selling quanted kimi/ds/etc as opus/fable

Arena.AI does this as well - they may appear as a leaderboard but what keeps business booming is their sale of traces to chinese labs

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#106

Post by alekstret » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

In my project, I pay a general price for using agent quota. For me, it's not about saving money but about being sure that I have full control over the usage limits. My product provides a pool that depends on the plan (100 or 500 requests per paying account per month), and when these credits are used, I offer a backup option to bring your own AI key to use. And last but not least, I want to be sure that users' data won't be used to train models.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#107

Post by LoganDark » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

I wonder if any of these providers have accounts that are in the cyber verification program. I got approved into it a week or two ago and there was no actual verification and only automated review. (Claude has never asked me for identity verification or even a phone number, and the email address of the account I use is a disposable relay address... I do not understand how they trust me so much, maybe it's the age of my account and the fact that I'm paying $200 a month ??)

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#108

Post by LoganDark » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #72

bonoboTP wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.

The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering. DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.

I don't think DeepSeek's price increase has to do with increased demand, but rather increased investment. I think they increased their capacity and want to make the money back.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#109

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

loufe wrote: post #103

The comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business. Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.

There's a strong theory with some rumors to support it that some of the largest customers of these services are labs doing distillation. The resellers are basically crowdsourcing the farming of accounts for them to use.

Doing MITM on other people's sessions isn't as interesting as simply sending your own synthetic requests to the models at a 97% discount. They manufacturer the questions and responses they want to train on.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#110

Post by tiffanyh » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

loufe wrote: post #103

The comments here are baffling. Is nobody seeing the easy opportunity for gathering amazing high-quality training data by inserting yourself as a MITM? If I were a competing lab, criminal, or opportunist I'd lie/cheat/steal/simply pay the difference to get the chance to listen into real life scenarios of usage of modern models in a high-impact business. Seems a huge part of the story completely absent to me.

Isn’t that essentially OpenRouter and Cursor play.