Researchers Expose 80,000 Relay Servers Masking Chinese Access to Claude and U.S. Frontier AI Models

Researchers have discovered a massive infrastructure of over 80,000 relay servers that Chinese users employ to bypass geographic restrictions on U.S. frontier AI models, including Anthropic's Claude, according to security research published in late September 2026. Team Cymru's investigation, which scanned relay networks across a 457-host infrastructure, confirmed initial detection of 10,867 relays—9,456 running sub2api, an open-source relay platform, and 1,353 running the older Claude Relay Service. Over an eight-day monitoring window, researchers documented over 4,000 unique addresses from China and Hong Kong connecting to 304 relays in a single cluster, underscoring the scale of the circumvention effort.