Russian AI resale gateways charge up to 3.6x official rates

After SWIFT sanctions cut Russian developers off from buying OpenAI and similar services, they turned to resale gateways using proxy accounts and foreign cards to reach frontier AI. The piece says AITUNNEL prices Claude Sonnet 5 at roughly 2.4-3.6x the official-exchange-rate equivalent, with similar markups on the pricier Claude Fable 5.1, an access premium rather than a simple token markup.

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