ContextArticle
A secondary market for reselling LLM tokens at a discount has grown up around pooling API keys from various sources.
Matt Lenhard investigated the emerging market where LLM tokens are resold at a discount through pooled API keys. ✦ AI generated
Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-26 · original ↗
Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation
Around this claim
This moment responds to
explains mechanism → Resellers achieve significant discounts on LLM API pricing by abusing free trials, proxying through unprotected support bots, and using stolen credit cards or chargeback attacks, mostly operating in China.Author · Simon Willison's Weblogprovides context → The proxy software used by token resellers is open source — primarily one-api and its fork new-api — both legitimate API proxy products for load balancing across API credentials.Author · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → Buyers in this market seek cheap tokens, want to bypass geo-restrictions, and in some cases collect data for model distillation.Author · Simon Willison's Weblogprovides context → The 1.5x-ratio black market API tokens are not actually running Claude — they substitute a much cheaper model with fake Claude identity — while the 5x-ratio tokens appear to deliver legitimate Claude.Wes · Syntax