- Matt Lenhard investigates the market for reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources, primarily in China.
- Resellers achieve discounts by abusing free trials, proxying through unprotected support bots, using stolen credit cards, or chargeback attacks.
- The proxy software used is open source, mainly one-api and its fork new-api, which are legitimate products but used maliciously.
- Buyers seek cheap tokens, avoid geo-restrictions, or collect data for model distillation.
- The author is more cautious about exposing LLM applications publicly due to this ecosystem of exploitation.
- The author calls for LLM vendors to offer strict caps on API keys to prevent abuse.