Team Cymru maps the relay layer that routes Chinese traffic into US frontier models, and puts a number on it
Team Cymru's Scott Fisher reports “10,867 confirmed transfer stations” across “457 distinct ASNs” — 9,456 running the sub2api software and 1,353 running the older Claude Relay Service, both published by a developer using the name Wei-Shaw — and adds that “since this analysis was conducted, Team Cymru has discovered more than 80,000 relays.” Over an eight-day window in late August, 244 source addresses in China and Hong Kong sent “approximately 14 TB up to the transfer station cluster and received over 7 TB down,” with thirteen addresses from one netblock sending about 9 TB to a single station; traffic from 17 stations to one frontier-model API ran about 81 GB up against 1.4 GB down, a 58:1 ratio the report puts at 16–23 billion input tokens. Team Cymru does not establish how much of the traffic is malicious.