- A market of 73,000 internet-facing servers resells Western frontier AI model access into mainland China, bypassing provider and government blocks.
- Two open-source projects, new-api and sub2api, dominate 74.3% of the servers, standardizing the reseller toolchain.
- Operators pool upstream subscriptions and sell access per token; customers never hold provider accounts and pay in RMB via Alipay or WeChat.
- Approximately 24,000 servers run on Chinese cloud networks (Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance), and 3,200 US-address servers are actually hosted by Alibaba/Tencent.
- The market uses billing panels and circumvention tools (e.g., VLESS, Shadowsocks) to cross the Great Firewall, with 10,000 servers running such transport software.
- Operators retain prompt-completion data as a by-product of billing, creating a potential distillation corpus that providers cannot audit.
- The market is openly advertised, with vocabulary like "transfer stations" and "carpooling"; it has settled into a retail model with price multipliers and trial credits.
- Infrawatch assesses the market persists due to real demand and trivial reconstruction of supply, and blocking by IP address merely shifted the market to an unmeasured layer.