Chinese Big Tech Allegedly Burns 1,000 Claude Accounts Daily as Anthropic Tightens China Bans
A Chinese AI observer reported today that a major domestic firm is consuming at least 1,000 Claude accounts each day to distill Anthropic’s model for its own training. The accounts get burned through and replaced with fresh pools as bans hit.
The claim fits a pattern Anthropic has already described in public. Earlier this year the company accused Alibaba-linked operators of using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts for 28.8 million exchanges, and it previously named DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in similar large-scale distillation campaigns. Anthropic has framed these as industrial efforts to extract frontier capabilities without the full cost of training.
On the commercial side, Claude’s web interface quietly added simplified and traditional Chinese options in early October. Days later, payment pages briefly showed China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as billing regions, along with a UnionPay option. Chinese tech media confirmed the interface changes through hands-on checks, though Anthropic issued no announcement and its official supported-regions list still excludes mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
That policy, clarified and effective November 12, restricts use by anyone physically located in unsupported regions, by entities headquartered there, and by companies majority-controlled from them.
Travel to Hangzhou or similar cities can already trigger account flags for Chinese users, according to the same reports. Legitimate subscribers who pay for access end up as collateral when detection systems respond to the high-volume distillation traffic.