Relays Are Masking Chinese Access to Frontier AI Models in the US

Researchers identified a sprawling network of relay servers—initially ~10.8K transfer stations later expanded to 80K relays—used to proxy Chinese users to frontier AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI). Operators pool API keys and subscription accounts, route requests through shared gateways (notably via open-source projects CRS and sub2api), and generate high-volume upload traffic indicative of large-scale model distillation and credential resale, enabling evasion of abuse detection, geographic restrictions, and account-level controls.