A vast network of intermediary servers is enabling users in China to access frontier AI models in the US without revealing their identities and location, likely to circumvent potential access restrictions and monitoring.
The volume of activity flowing through the network suggests systematic attempts to use outputs from frontier AI models to create less capable versions at substantially lower cost than developing them independently, Team Cymru said in a report this week. The findings come just days after the US government accused Chinese AI companies of attempting to clone US AI capabilities via systematic distillation campaigns.
A Sprawling Network of 80K LLMs
Researchers from the company recently identified more than 80,000 LLM relay servers that are acting as intermediaries between users and AI providers. The relay servers allow operators to pool credentials for multiple AI accounts and route user requests through the servers to frontier services, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI.
The proxies can undermine the controls that frontier AI providers rely on to detect and restrict misuse, Team Cymru researcher Scott Fisher wrote in the analysis. By separating the apparent requester from the actual user, relay servers can help obscure who is accessing models and enable users to bypass potential geographic restrictions. They also allow users to share or resell credentials, and to evade a provider's terms of service.
"A transfer station breaks the assumption every frontier-model control depends on: that the account making a request belongs to the party consuming the answer," Fisher wrote. "Account attribution, usage metering, rate limits, abuse detection, regional availability, and the terms that govern all of them are enforced against whoever holds the credentials." Relay servers break this assumption and enable fraud on a massive scale, he said.