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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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...