How People in China Keep Outsmarting Anthropic’s Geolocation Restrictions
How People in China Keep Outsmarting Anthropic’s Geolocation Restrictions
Anthropic goes to great lengths to prevent people in China from using its AI models, but in practice, its safeguards have often failed. Over the past year, startups, researchers, and tech enthusiasts across the country have developed increasingly sophisticated workarounds to access Claude. Many of them consider it the world’s most capable AI assistant, making the extra effort to obtain it worthwhile.
Anthropic 竭尽全力阻止中国用户使用其 AI 模型，但在实践中，其安全防护措施往往失效。过去一年里，中国各地的初创公司、研究人员和科技爱好者开发了日益复杂的变通方法来访问 Claude。许多人认为它是世界上最强大的 AI 助手，因此即便需要付出额外努力也觉得物有所值。
In early June, Anthropic publicly released Fable 5, a safeguarded version of its most powerful AI model to date, Mythos. Chinese social media immediately lit up with posts from people sharing their impressions after trying it out. (Anthropic revoked access to the model worldwide a few days later in response to export controls imposed by the Trump administration).
6 月初，Anthropic 公开发布了 Fable 5，这是其迄今为止最强大的 AI 模型 Mythos 的安全版本。中国社交媒体上随即涌现出大量用户分享试用后的感受。（几天后，为响应特朗普政府实施的出口管制，Anthropic 在全球范围内撤销了对该模型的访问权限。）
Chinese people generally can access other Western AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, by using virtual private networks, foreign phone numbers, and international payment methods to create and maintain their accounts. But Anthropic has arguably taken more aggressive steps, such as banning accounts that it suspects are owned and controlled by people located in China. On Chinese social media, users frequently report that they have been suspended from Claude without warning, despite taking those precautions.
中国用户通常可以通过使用虚拟专用网络 (VPN)、国外手机号和国际支付方式来创建并维护账户，从而访问 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 等其他西方 AI 工具。但 Anthropic 采取的措施可以说更为激进，例如封禁其怀疑由中国境内人员拥有和控制的账户。在中国社交媒体上，用户经常反映，尽管采取了上述预防措施，他们的 Claude 账户仍会被无预警封禁。
The cat-and-mouse game has fueled a thriving underground economy for Claude access in China. Accounts are sold on Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao and through illicit marketplaces on Telegram. More recently, a cottage industry of “transfer stations” has also emerged. These services act as intermediaries, purchasing access to Anthropic’s API outside China and then redistributing Claude API tokens to users inside the country. The set up is designed to give startups and other professional users more stable and reliable access to AI assistant.
这场“猫鼠游戏”助长了中国 Claude 访问权限的地下经济。账户在淘宝等中国电商平台以及 Telegram 上的非法市场中进行交易。最近，一种名为“中转站”的家庭作坊式产业也随之兴起。这些服务充当中间商，在境外购买 Anthropic 的 API 访问权限，然后将 Claude API 令牌（token）分发给国内用户。这种设置旨在为初创公司和其他专业用户提供更稳定、更可靠的 AI 助手访问途径。
Michael Aciman, a spokesperson for Anthropic, says that the company uses a range of evolving detection systems, including identity verification, to enforce its policies against unauthorized access to Claude. He added that Anthropic has also worked to detect and disrupt proxy networks used to provide access to the chatbot in China.
Anthropic 发言人 Michael Aciman 表示，公司使用了一系列不断演进的检测系统（包括身份验证）来执行其禁止未经授权访问 Claude 的政策。他补充说，Anthropic 也一直在努力检测并干扰那些用于在中国提供聊天机器人访问权限的代理网络。
Despite all of the difficulties Chinese people are forced to overcome to use Claude, there remain many loyal fans of Anthropic in the country. It’s especially popular among programmers. Even though Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Z.ai have some of the most capable open-source large language models on the market, third-party tests still show that they lag behind leading closed models like Claude. During a recent reporting trip to China, WIRED spoke to academics and engineers at multiple tech companies who said that they preferred using Claude over Chinese models to generate code, and are eager to try out each new model that Anthropic releases.
尽管中国用户在使用 Claude 时不得不克服重重困难，但该国仍有许多 Anthropic 的忠实粉丝。它在程序员群体中尤为受欢迎。尽管 DeepSeek 和 Z.ai 等中国公司拥有市场上一些最强大的开源大语言模型，但第三方测试仍显示它们落后于 Claude 等领先的闭源模型。在最近的一次中国采访之旅中，WIRED 与多家科技公司的学者和工程师进行了交流，他们表示更喜欢使用 Claude 而非国产模型来生成代码，并且渴望尝试 Anthropic 发布的每一款新模型。
Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, looked into the black market for reselling Western AI tokens to Chinese users. He noted that Chinese software developers say they overwhelmingly prefer using tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex compared to tools from domestic companies. “Analysis shows that Chinese models are still six to nine months behind the US models, and for specific things like coding and developing, you can obviously tell the gap,” Qian says.
牛津大学中国政策实验室的研究助理 Zilan Qian 对向中国用户转售西方 AI 令牌的黑市进行了调查。他指出，中国软件开发人员表示，与国内公司的工具相比，他们绝大多数更喜欢使用 Claude Code 和 OpenAI 的 Codex 等工具。“分析显示，中国模型仍落后于美国模型 6 到 9 个月，而在编码和开发等特定领域，你可以明显感觉到差距，”Qian 说。
“For both Chinese AI policymakers and technical people, they have much less of a problem drawing on and using American ideas or products, regardless of the geopolitical or ideological rivalry,” says Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he researches AI policy and China. “It’s Americans who tend to think an idea or a product is tainted just because it comes from their rival,” he says.
“对于中国的 AI 政策制定者和技术人员来说，无论地缘政治或意识形态竞争如何，他们在使用美国理念或产品方面几乎没有心理负担，”卡内基国际和平基金会高级研究员 Matt Sheehan 说，他在该机构研究 AI 政策与中国。“反倒是美国人往往认为，只要一个理念或产品来自竞争对手，它就是‘被污染’的，”他说。
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s cofounder and CEO, often explicitly singles out Chinese access to frontier models as a critical threat to US national security. Just this week, Anthropic accused Alibaba of using Claude outputs to train the Chinese company’s rival models, a technique known as “distillation.” Anthropic has also claimed other Chinese companies have done the same thing in the past. For this and other national security reasons, Anthropic does not offer commercial access to Claude in China, or to subsidiaries of Chinese companies located outside of the country.
Anthropic 的联合创始人兼首席执行官 Dario Amodei 经常明确指出，中国对前沿模型的访问是对美国国家安全的重大威胁。就在本周，Anthropic 指责阿里巴巴使用 Claude 的输出来训练其竞争模型，这种技术被称为“蒸馏”（distillation）。Anthropic 还声称其他中国公司过去也做过同样的事情。出于这一原因以及其他国家安全考虑，Anthropic 不在中国提供 Claude 的商业访问权限，也不向位于中国境外的中国公司子公司提供服务。
Still, people continue to find workarounds. For casual users, that might mean sticking to classic tactics like turning on a VPN and using a consistent proxy location, creating the illusion that they are always connecting to Claude from the same place instead of bouncing around the world. Less technical users can go on Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao and Xianyu to buy Claude accounts that have already been set up. Anthropic often still bans them after a while, but for people who only want to briefly test Claude or ask occasional questions, the loss is manageable.
尽管如此，人们仍在不断寻找变通方法。对于普通用户来说，这可能意味着坚持使用经典策略，例如开启 VPN 并使用固定的代理位置，从而制造出一种他们始终从同一地点连接到 Claude 的假象，而不是在全球范围内跳跃。技术水平较低的用户可以在淘宝和闲鱼等中国电商平台上购买已经设置好的 Claude 账户。Anthropic 往往会在一段时间后封禁这些账户，但对于那些只想简单测试 Claude 或偶尔提问的用户来说，这种损失是可以接受的。
Similar marketplaces have popped up on Telegram over the last few years, says Hieu Minh Ngo, a reformed criminal hacker turned cybercrime investigator at the Vietnamese scam-fighting nonprofit ChongLuaDao. On websites and Telegram channels Ngo and other researchers shared with WIRED, users market what they claim to be Claude Pro and Claude Max accounts, alongside others for ChatGPT Plus and Gemini Plus. These underground Chinese-language marketplaces particularly focus on selling “pro” accounts, which allow greater numbers of prompts to be sent, Ngo says.
越南反诈骗非营利组织 ChongLuaDao 的网络犯罪调查员、曾是黑客的 Hieu Minh Ngo 表示，过去几年里，类似的交易市场在 Telegram 上如雨后春笋般涌现。在 Ngo 和其他研究人员与 WIRED 分享的网站和 Telegram 频道中，用户兜售着他们声称是 Claude Pro 和 Claude Max 的账户，以及 ChatGPT Plus 和 Gemini Plus 的账户。Ngo 说，这些地下中文市场特别专注于销售“专业版”（pro）账户，因为这些账户允许发送更多的提示词。
The frenzy over OpenClaw in China earlier this year also fueled demand for AI agents, Qian says. Because these tools perform more complex tasks, they consume far more tokens than a typical chatbot session. For heavy users, especially developers who need a constant stream of prompts and responses, finding affordable, reliable access to tools like Claude and Codex quickly became a necessity.
Qian 表示，今年早些时候中国对 OpenClaw 的狂热也推动了对 AI 代理的需求。由于这些工具执行的任务更为复杂，它们消耗的令牌远多于普通的聊天机器人会话。对于重度用户，尤其是需要持续进行提示和响应的开发人员来说，寻找负担得起且可靠的 Claude 和 Codex 等工具的访问途径很快成为了一种刚需。
That’s when transfer stations, also called relay stations, came in. Set up with servers in an Anthropic-supported country, they w
这时，被称为“中转站”或“转发站”的服务便应运而生。它们在 Anthropic 支持的国家/地区架设服务器，从而……