Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider me incredibly skeptical of any of these claims.
Same, I don't even see how that would work since you see the full thinking traces in Kimi but are hidden with Claude. And the Deepseek one sounds even more dubious as Deepseek is one of the cheapest model around, why relay anything to a more expensive model? I'm sure even the gray market Claude prices are still higher than Deepseek.
I'm skeptical too, but there's a parallel market where people re-sell accounts and access tokens. This would make tokens much cheaper.
There's also an argument to be made that paying the token full price may be cheaper than going through your one RLHF or whatever other techniques that costs money.