Quick answer
Are cheap ChatGPT or Claude API keys safe to buy?
Usually not. OpenAI's terms ban buying or selling API keys, and Anthropic forbids resale without its approval, so the account behind a resold key can be shut down. Press reports read on 23 October 2026 tie below-list Claude access to shared subscriptions, stolen cards and logging of customers' prompts. LLMwithCrypto does not sell GPT or Claude; it serves open-weight models it runs itself.
Which kinds of cheap offers exist?
The common models, as described in reporting and on marketplace pages read on 23 October 2026. We record no seller and link to none.
| Offer | How it works | Main risk |
|---|---|---|
| Shared seat | One paid Plus, Pro or Max account split between many buyers | Breaks every consumer terms of use; checks on devices, sessions and location |
| “Activation on your account” | A middleman pays your subscription with a foreign card and needs your login | Your account is still used from an unsupported country; bans |
| Pre-made account | Accounts registered in bulk and their logins sold | The seller keeps the email and recovery; some pools were bought with stolen cards |
| Team seat invite | A reseller owns a workspace and sells seats in it | The owner can remove you at any time |
| Resold API key or “transfer station” | A relay sells Claude or GPT below list price | Prompt logging, model substitution, stolen credentials |
| Telegram bot | The bot calls the model with the operator's key | The operator sees every prompt; the key can be cut off |
Prices checked on
What do OpenAI and Anthropic say about reselling?
- OpenAI bans attempts to “buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to, or with a third party” (Services Agreement, read 22 October 2026), and its consumer terms say: “You may not share your account credentials or make your account available to anyone else.”
- Anthropic forbids reselling “except as expressly approved by Anthropic”, and its usage policy bans providing access to Claude “through unauthorized means”.
The resale rules dataset quotes 15 providers with links and dates.
Where do keys far below list price come from?
The sellers do not say. Reporting gives several answers. Tom's Hardware described a Chinese grey market selling Claude access at up to 90% off through proxy networks, built on shared Max plans, farmed credits and stolen cards, and quoted the view that “harvesting those logs is the actual business”. Security firm Sysdig documented “LLMjacking”: stolen cloud credentials used to run models on someone else's bill.
Anthropic itself wrote in February 2026 that “a single proxy network managed more than 20,000 fraudulent accounts simultaneously”.
What can go wrong with your prompts?
Everything you send through a relay passes through its operator. A relay can keep your prompts and the answers, which matters if you paste code, contracts or customer data. One test reported by Tom's Hardware found a proxy selling “Gemini-2.5” that scored 37% on a benchmark where the official model scored about 84%: a cheaper model answered under a famous name.
None of this can be checked from the outside. A low price is the only signal you get.
Do accounts really get banned?
Yes, at scale. Anthropic's transparency report for January to June 2026 counts 11.4 million banned accounts, 398,000 appeals and 42,000 bans overturned. In October 2026, users in Russia and Hong Kong reported Claude bans after connecting through VPNs. A marketplace that refunds a banned account usually pays back part of the price, not your lost work.
How can I spot a risky offer?
- The price is well below the maker's list price and nobody says why.
- The seller needs your login, or gives you one it keeps control of.
- The offer promises access from countries the maker does not serve.
- There is no company name, no address and no terms of service.
- Support is a Telegram handle only.
If you need GPT or Claude, buy from the maker or from a reseller it has approved.
What does LLMwithCrypto do differently?
We sell only what we are allowed to serve. Only open-weight models whose licences allow serving them as an API: DeepSeek, Qwen, gpt-oss, Mistral, Llama, Gemma and others listed on the models page. We run them on GPUs we rent and operate. We do not sell access to GPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok: their makers forbid reselling API access without their approval, and we do not have it.
We do not store your prompts or the model’s answers: once a response is sent, its text is gone. Each call leaves one log line with the time, the account, the model and the token counts, deleted after 30 days. We never train or fine-tune any model on your prompts or outputs. Prices follow a published rule: Each model costs 5% less than the median price of the public hosts that list it, for input and output tokens, read on 2026-10-23, so nothing is “too cheap to be true”. Payment is in BTC, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL, LTC, with no KYC.
Cheap AI API keys: common questions
Is it illegal to buy a shared ChatGPT account?
It breaks OpenAI's terms of use, which forbid sharing credentials; whether it is illegal depends on your country. The practical risk is a ban, with no recourse against OpenAI.
Do marketplaces protect buyers of AI accounts?
Partly. FunPay's rules, read on 23 October 2026, refund up to 50% when a service bans an account because it was sold. Plati says it is not a party to the deal between buyer and seller.
Are all cheap AI APIs scams?
No. Open-weight models really are cheaper to serve, and hosts compete on price. The warning applies to closed models such as Claude and GPT sold far below the maker's own price.
Can I check what model answers my prompts?
Not reliably from outside. Running open-weight models with a stated licence, as we do, is one way to know which model you get.
Sources (12)
- Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90 percent off through proxy networks that harvest user data — Tom's Hardware (read 2026-10-23)
- The grey market for American LLMs — ChinaTalk (read 2026-10-23)
- LLMjacking: stolen cloud credentials used in new AI attack — Sysdig (read 2026-10-23)
- Detecting and preventing distillation attacks — Anthropic (read 2026-10-23)
- System trust reporting — Anthropic (read 2026-10-23)
- Claude users from Russia and Hong Kong report account bans after VPN use — Novaya Gazeta Europe (read 2026-10-23)
- Services Agreement — OpenAI (read 2026-10-22)
- Terms of use — OpenAI (read 2026-10-22)
- Commercial Terms of Service — Anthropic (read 2026-10-22)
- Usage Policy — Anthropic (read 2026-10-23)
- FunPay rules — FunPay (read 2026-10-23)
- Plati buyer terms — Plati (read 2026-10-23)