Chinese proxies resell US AI models, with crypto as the payment rail

Proxy services sit in the middle, routing queries into restricted frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude while masking where the requests came from, according to Chainalysis research. Customers pay through fiat channels including WeChat and AliPay, but 40% of the surveyed services also take crypto, predominantly stablecoins. Crypto matters here because it lets the operators sidestep state capital controls and keep sensitive users off-grid, with many relying on custodial payment processors that add another layer between buyer and provider.

The operation has grown into a structured economy with a segmented supply chain. Vendors get hold of model access through account farming and model swapping, while proxy services run the downstream business of pooling access and selling subscriptions. That layering is exactly what makes the market so hard to disrupt. Chinese AI companies use the access to distill outputs from advanced models, upgrading their own systems without paying to train from scratch.

Anthropic has accused Chinese labs including DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of using 24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from its Claude model. Those illicitly distilled models often ship without safeguards, which the report flags as a risk to critical infrastructure and other domains. The National Security Agency recently warned that unauthorized models of this kind could spread dangerous capabilities.

Chainalysis also spotted a jump in activity from suspected Chinese-linked cryptocurrency wallets right after new U.S. frontier AI models launched, a pattern it says fits efforts to grab and distill new capabilities fast. The data does not confirm causation, but it lines up with crypto's role as the payment rail for the proxy economy. Wallet activity clustered in China and nearby regions, including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, pointing to regional proxy corridors.

Blocking direct access to frontier models won't be enough when a multi-tiered supply chain exists to resell that access. Chainalysis notes blockchain intelligence tools could trace the financial flows, potentially exposing the links between proxy services and their users. But the market keeps adapting, with new vendors stepping in whenever others get disrupted.