Reddit exposé: 'transit station' grey market resells pooled OpenAI subscriptions and distills SOTA models
aenotfound · reddit · 2026-09-07
A Reddit post maps out the grey industry around OpenAI and Anthropic:
- Account pooling: automated mass signup of free/edu promotional accounts, with tools like sub2api reverse-proxying subscription tokens to resell at 10-30% of official pricing; abnormal accounts get banned within 1-3 days, sometimes under 24 hours.
- Pro-tier transit stations: another class acts as agencies for competing AI companies to distill OpenAI and Anthropic models at mind-blowing scale; vendors have fought back with measures including hiding parts of model CoT.
- A circulating joke: every time OpenAI announces 1M new subs, half are created by account-pooling bros. Most transit stations skip the cheap 5.6 Luna tier since there's no profit margin.
The author says all of this is publicly researchable via Grok searching X posts in multiple languages.
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