The AI Credit Resale Economy

A common refrain is that oh there are such great margins on tokens that none of this matters… I wonder how long until that notion will be disavowed? The scale of the tokensnaffling is massive, not just from resale, but also people using multiple subscriptions. The amount of subsidization is only growing, every week it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing “resets” which allow a single $200 subscription to incur $20k+ of usage (if billed at API rates). At some point we must all surely accept that the economics of this do not work.

The original article linked in the opening has more context https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market

People trading their unused credits feels more genuine, although still in violation of the agreements. The person who got into YC Startup School who was trying to resell the $2500 of credits was interesting. It wouldn’t be that hard for OpenAI to identify the IP addresses of the relays and start flagging accounts, tracing it back to the source. Risking burning your bridges with YC for a relatively small profit is a questionable decision.

The original article showed discounts ranging all the way up to 98%. At those levels it’s obviously not people reselling anything. It’s either sourced from stolen API keys, bought with stolen credit cards, or acquired through automated sign up of trial accounts if you’re actually getting the API you request.

I would expect a lot of them are reselling a different API. Sign up for Anthropic tokens and get Deepseek responses instead.

Most of these are your standard botnet rings. Either accounts directly are taken over, and the attacker adds 2FA or carding rings take stolen #s and attempt to add credits.

It is...incredible how many there are. Stripe does far too little in my opinion to help prevent issues like this, even though they have the business intelligence and enough data to do so.

Wait a sec, I have to trust a third party with basically no reputation, did I get it right?

It's basically asking for being hacked and/or sending you private data to random email addresses! Neither at a 99% discount I'd do it.

I understand if someone, for any reason, cannot access a specific model ... But nowadays, there are so many alternatives that even this doesn't make sense any more.

The reseller could use an intermediate proxy and modify the traffic like in [1], to get control of the client machine - depending on the harness permissions.

TLS terminates at the proxy (say, https://reselltokens.ai), end to end integrity is not enforced. LLM traffic contains tool calls like "bash ...", which are executed on the client machine, they can be manipulated. Secret exfil is also possible.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2604.08407v1

This research is way toooo shallow. He really should go check out linux.do or nodeseek.com — token resale economy there is truly breathtaking.

Distillation is one of the most unique and interesting aspects of this.

But otherwise, if a company gives something valuable for creating an account on their platform, expect that people will automate the creation of millions of accounts. If employees of B2B partners get benefits, they will resell them. Accounts will be hacked and resold. The same basic abuse patterns are decades old for online delivery services, loyalty accounts for airline and hotels, etc. There are entire industries dedicated to those spaces as well: large organizations with physical offices, hundreds of employees, HR departments, etc. dedicated to reselling digital benefits on grey markets.

Some companies are tolerant of allowing this to happen. The pessimistic view is that even illegitimate traffic contributes to the KPIs that your investors care about. The slightly less pessimistic view is that fraud prevention will always have trade-offs and false positives, and sometimes the savings of preventing fraud are genuinely outweighed by the false positives. Or maybe it's just Hanlon's razor and they truly never saw it coming.

Yunwu.ai was a nice way to get ultra-cheap tokens that someone will probably spy on you with, but they no longer offer US models.

At first I thought it was so people could steal the traces, but now I wonder if this isn't just laundering startup credits for dollars.

Cyberpunk dystopia vibes

What does the demand side look like? I understand why people have these tokens they want to sell, who wants to buy them?

> I checked where you’d expect to find underground marketplaces. Telegram had a few channels, with one being relatively active.

It's not exactly "underground" if they clearly advertising public channels out in the open.

There's a lot of assertion here and the other article that this fraud and abuse but is there any evidence of that?

A simpler explanation is that that this is just a resale market.

Hey Claude, scan these marketplaces for arbitrage opportunities.

The thing will eat itself unless the AI companies find a way to make money directly from it.

Men breaching Sauron's ToS by reselling their nine rings of power, and they think they are beating the system.

So are they stealing from their employers or is something else going on?

This would be a fantastic method of getting data for distillation, would be surprised if that's not why the tokens are so cheap

Cool to see my thesis validated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664223

> CREDITS FROM YC STARTUP SCHOOL

Join YC, get free shit from the network, profit. Nice.

So let's see, we have the following factors in play:

1) Capitalism - Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes (Keynesian Economics), etc., etc. in most places in the world...

2) Huge validated existing international market...

3) Multi-jurisdictional World... laws/statutory codes applicable to businesses in specific circumstances in one place may not be applicable to businesses in specific circumstances in another...

4) AI Tokens are a commodity; i.e., there is no chokepoint or monopoly controlled by one AI company in one jurisdiction, i.e., if one AI company makes rules unacceptable to a token consumer, that consumer can simply switch providers to another provider in another jurisdiction somewhere else in the world.

5) Tokens can be bought, sold, and resold at profit just like any other good or service.

6) Tokens can be bought from anywhere in the world and sold to anywhere in the world. Easily.

7) Tokens are a digital good, easy to scale, and do not require supply chains, lead times, labor, manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, going through geographic chokepoints, customs, etc., etc. -- all of the things that manufactured goods do.

8) Many people around the world want to make money or make more money... i.e., "economic incentive" (aka Capitalism's "profit motive")...

Well... add all of those together and what do you get?

You get buy/sell/trade forums/auctions/individuals/brokers/businesspeople -- around that market...

Just like you get those same things around every other market.

In this large multi-jurisdictional world, if one government makes all of that illegal in their country, then another government is going to be happily collecting all of the taxes from making all of that legal, in theirs!

If a given government makes trade illegal -- then they correspondingly lose the tax revenue...

Taxes and trade are intricately, intricately intertwined...

Could this business model be used for money laundering or other illegal activities?

Yes -- but any other business model could as well!

And, on the flip side, this business model could be accomplished legally/lawfully/morally/ethically -- just like any other business where there is an actual underlying value being exchanged.

Because, AI Tokens, if legally/lawfully/morally/ethically traded, do have underlying value...

In conclusion, at this point in time, I am neither for this business model nor against it...

But I think it'll be highly interesting to watch this space for the next couple of years, to see what happens, to see who does what, to see what plays out on the legal front, on the government front (foreign + domestic), on the media front, and on the technology front surrounding it...

These are amateurs compared to what's happening in China.