The consequences of locking intelligence away: an introduction to Claude relays in China

According to a post on LessWrong, China's AI access restrictions have created an unexpected market effect: a thriving grey market for Western models. Unauthorized relay services on Taobao now resell Claude and ChatGPT at one-tenth the official price. Chinese tech communities have built rating sites to evaluate relay quality and availability. The result: domestic Chinese language models struggle to compete with heavily discounted foreign alternatives. The author argues this is an irony of access bans—they backfired economically—though data security risks are substantial.

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