Russian Firms Turn to Gray-Market Access to Foreign AI Models
Gray-market resellers of foreign AI models via Chinese proxies reached 100–150 million rubles in August, as cheap prices lure Russian small and mid-sized firms.
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A fast-growing market
According to estimates from GPTunneL, a large platform offering access to foreign AI chatbots, legal aggregators had a monthly turnover of 700 million rubles as of August. From January to August their turnover rose fourfold year on year to 5–6 billion rubles, excluding Big Tech. The company expects sales volumes to roughly double by year-end, which would take the legal aggregator market to about 1.4 billion rubles a month and gray suppliers to 200–300 million rubles a month.
Gray providers can charge up to 70% less than official API rates. They mainly rely on two schemes: selling access through farms of accounts and subscriptions disguised as an official API, and avoiding VAT on foreign electronic services. The standard 22% VAT widens the gap, said Vladislav Kudinov, CTO of Veai, since unofficial gateways sell without closing documents or data-protection guarantees.
Risks for buyers
LLM Arena founder Roman Kutsev said Chinese intermediaries may offer access for 10% of a model's real cost by rereselling client data for model training. Customers may also receive cheaper Chinese models such as MiniMax or Qwen instead of the Claude model they paid for. Growth of the gray market coincided with last autumn's release of the coding model Claude Opus 4.5. Anthropic's blocks have raised demand for gateways, but an expert noted the vendor can disable their accounts too.
Running open models locally is held back by a shortage of powerful GPUs in Russia, which Kutsev estimated can cost several times more than at foreign providers. Large firms are also looking for intermediaries: NSPK, operator of the Mir payment system, showed interest in annual Claude Max and Codex Pro access in 2026, while CRPT, which runs the Chestny Znak labeling system, sought an aggregator for Claude, Qwen and DeepSeek tokens. Salutdevices, a Sber ecosystem smart-device developer, looked for a supplier of Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Kimi subscriptions.
IT industry representatives said they would like tax relief for cloud access to AI models, either a zero rate or compensation for buyers.
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