Xianyu | Generated by AI
Question: What does this Huxiu article about Xianyu (闲鱼) becoming the AI-era “black market” say?
Answer:
It’s an op-ed by 杉森楠 (AI Humanist) arguing that Xianyu — Alibaba’s secondhand marketplace — has quietly become China’s largest gray market for AI products and services. The core claims:
What’s for sale. Almost anything AI-adjacent: ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini memberships (shared and dedicated accounts), API credits and token top-ups, quota-reset counts, Midjourney/Suno generation-as-a-service, hand-written Skills, prompt workflows, and even a 15,000-word tutorial on building a “clean environment” for Claude.
The Codex hook. The article opens on someone selling Codex rate-limit reset counts. These come from an OpenAI Codex referral growth campaign (June 11–24, 2026): Plus/Pro users invite up to 3 friends; when an invitee sends their first message, both sides get a banked rate-limit reset. People are reselling these banked resets. The author notes a GPT Pro 5x tier’s 5-hour quota (~50M tokens, worth ~$100+ at API-equivalent pricing) reselling on Xianyu for ~3 RMB.
Vendor marketing gets arbitraged within hours. Every overseas growth campaign — Gemini’s free year for students (gated behind SheerID verification + payment binding), quota resets, first-order rebates — gets “caught” by Xianyu sellers within hours and resold cheaply. The student deal splits into two paths: buy a ready-made account (a few dozen RMB), or keep your own account and pay a seller to complete the SheerID student verification for you (cheaper, you retain the account).
Why people buy memberships there. Two reasons: abnormally low prices (sketchy sourcing), or — for heavily locked-down services like Claude — because official pricing is sometimes more expensive than Xianyu, and Xianyu helps bypass tightening privacy/identity checks. The author flags Claude’s new privacy policy (effective July 8) requiring age/identity verification — ID photos, selfies, video, facial geometry — that may trigger on Free/Pro/Max accounts.
Custom services, not just products. Decentralized Skills (vertical-niche ones for as little as ¥0.1 — a “virtual board of experts” Skill, cross-border e-commerce tools, novel-writing Skills, even a “白毛股神 Serenity” stock-picker Skill named after an anonymous X investing KOL). Plus soft consulting — Codex setup help for beginners stuck on infinite spinners or Windows install issues.
The “divine book” anecdote. After the author’s 6 full-price Claude Max accounts got banned and months of self-debugging (network, hardware) failed, he paid a few dozen RMB for an “AI clean-environment setup” consult. The seller delivered a 49-page, 15,000-word Word doc covering hardware → Claude Code install → browser → network, with full methodology, FAQ, relay-station (中转站) deployment principles, and appendices.
Why Xianyu, not Taobao. Two structural reasons: (1) AI goods here are tiny, perishable, non-standard units — a single quota reset, one Skill, debugging one workflow — with no stable supply, appearing and vanishing with vendor campaigns. Taobao excels at standardized, high-volume goods; this is the opposite. (2) Many AI gray goods are really services + tacit knowledge requiring a real person to deliver. Taobao Skills are industrialized junk (“most complete 2000-Skill bundle for ¥9.9, basically useless”); Xianyu Skills come from someone who actually wrote and uses them.
Author’s framing. He reframes “black market” as a grassroots access layer (民间接入层) for Chinese AI users — filling gaps left by bans, the no-overseas-credit-card payment wall, and regional restrictions. Overseas vendors spend real money on acquisition via student discounts/free credits/rebates; Xianyu sellers cash out that overflow value. “Vendors pay to acquire users; Xianyu helps users cash out.”
Caveat. Real risks: account bans, non-delivery, privacy leaks, original owner reclaiming accounts. Cheap prices hide invisible costs — know what you’re getting into before ordering.