Even Sam Altman Would Want to Buy From Them: The Hubris of Grassroots AI Proxy Bosses Billing With Their 'Entire Net Worth'

In our investigation into the supply chain of AI proxy services, one phenomenon caught our attention: some ridiculously cheap, grassroots proxies are actually claiming they can "accept corporate bank transfers and issue official invoices."

This is, undeniably, a contradiction. According to common sense, this type of business—which relies on gray-market sources like stolen credit cards, exploits, and vulnerabilities to sell API access at 20%-30% of the official price—should be hiding behind anonymous payment methods. However, the real samples we obtained present a completely different picture:

Upon verification, the operator of this studio is the site owner himself. He uses his real name, registered a sole proprietorship (个体户 in China), and opened a real corporate bank account.

This behavior itself is a puzzle worth deconstructing: Why would the operator of a business whose supply source is inherently shady proactively expose his real identity, business registration, and bank accounts to the sunlight? Does he not understand the law, or does he think he understands it too well? Is he truly fearless, or has he just not done the math?

This sample gives us the best entry point to observe the survival state of grassroots proxy services. It allows us to bypass industry rumors and start directly from pieces of living evidence left in the registry and banking systems, to see exactly what logic these end-of-the-line players are using and what kind of game they are playing.

1. The Industry Panorama: The Three-Tier Architecture of AI Proxies

Before diving deep into the "real name, real ID" sole proprietor sample, it's necessary to establish the entire coordinate system of the AI proxy industry. Based on the nature of the supply, operating entities, and compliance levels, the players in the current market can generally be divided into three tiers.

Tier 1: Grassroots Proxies. These are the core targets of our investigation. They are extremely small, usually consisting of a single person or a loose grouping of a few, with no decent office space and no formal employees. They have only one core competency: extreme low prices. The supply comes from upstream gray/black market channels, and financially, they have zero compliant procurement costs. Consequently, they can sell at 20% to 30% of the official prices—a discount that logically self-destructs: if this price were truly sustainable legitimately, major companies like OpenAI should be buying from them instead. Their existence is precisely the lowest-level noise signal in the entire supply chain.

Tier 2: Domestic "White Glove" Companies. These players have formal operating entities in China, but their compliance is not built on their own supply. Instead, it’s achieved through a "shell" structure—setting up a compliant front entity overseas, which makes formal purchases from vendors like OpenAI, and then resells them back into the country. The cost of this operation is that every layer of the compliance chain eats up profit margins, so their selling prices are mostly retail prices with very low discount rates. Essentially, they are earning a service fee for providing a compliance bridge, rather than performing informational arbitrage.

Tier 3: Legitimate Overseas Enterprises. The operating entities and core principals of these players are located overseas, subject to local laws, and the entire business chain operates within a compliance framework from start to finish. They don't need "shells" or "white gloves" and exist in a completely different legal and commercial coordinate system from domestic grassroots proxies and white glove companies. Their pricing is relatively flexible, but that is the product of a different set of rules and is beyond the scope of this article.

What this article will dissect next is a highly representative cross-section of the first-tier grassroots proxies: those who, despite having illegal supplies and deformed pricing, dare to operate as sole proprietors under their real names. Their existence provides us with a rare, verifiable window into the edge ecology of this industry.

2. "Sole Proprietorships" and Invoicing

Why do these grassroots site owners uniformly choose "Sole Proprietorship" (个体工商户) as their business identity? The answer lies in one word: Invoicing.

For a solo developer with no partners and no registered capital, legally there are only two ways to issue a formal invoice to a client: either go to the tax bureau as an individual to have them issue it on your behalf—which is cumbersome, has tight limits, and looks unprofessional—or register a market entity and use your own entity to issue invoices. Among all entity types, a sole proprietorship has the lowest barrier to entry, the fastest process, and the lowest cost. It doesn't require paid-in registered capital, partners, or a commercial office address. Within a few days, you can get a business license, complete tax registration, and obtain invoices.

In other words, a sole proprietorship is the only shortcut for an individual developer to gain "formal invoicing rights."

Once they have this identity, a series of functional upgrades follows: they can open corporate bank accounts to bypass various limits on personal collections; they can collect corporate payments, meeting the rigid requirements of clients who need to go through enterprise reimbursement processes; and they can issue VAT invoices, packaging a transaction that should be "shady" into a legitimate business dealing.

More importantly, this identity comes with a psychological camouflage. "Real-name registration, corporate collection, capable of issuing invoices"—when these three signals are combined, in the client's subconscious, they automatically translate to "legitimate, traceable, won't run away." For a site whose prices are suspiciously low, this aura of trust is an almost zero-cost customer acquisition tool.

But this is exactly where the problem lies: this "perfect shell" only solves the issue of form, it cannot cover up the substance. The sole proprietor identity gives him the right to issue invoices, but it doesn't give him a legal source of supply; it gives him the qualification to open a corporate account, but it chains him to unlimited joint liability. The identity is legal, the business is illegal. This crack between appearance and reality is the sum of this character's tragedy.

3. When the Most "Compliant" Facade Meets the Most "Illegal" Supply

Now, we arrive at the core tension of this specimen.

Looking from the outside, this studio possesses almost all the formal elements: traceable business registration, complete tax records, and a genuine corporate bank account. After an enterprise client completes the corporate payment process and receives a VAT invoice, no abnormal alerts will trigger in their financial system. On the surface, this studio is indistinguishable from the legitimate businesses operating on the street corner.

But flip it over, and the situation is entirely different. Its supply—the underlying resource supporting that extreme "20%-30% of official price" discount—financially does not exist. It's not that the margins are thin; there are simply zero compliant procurement costs. He doesn't need to pay OpenAI bills, doesn't need to ask for input invoices from any formal distributors, and doesn't need to record a single cent of traceable expense in the ledger. Every dollar he sells corresponds on the books to almost a dollar of pure profit. This is no longer an issue of operating efficiency; this is a financial illusion born of an illegal supply.

Put these two sides together, and you get an absurd picture: a micro-enterprise that looks flawless in the commerce and tax systems, while its true business core is a gray operation whose costs cannot be explained. And that invoicing capability, which the owner views as a "bonus feature," is precisely the deadliest finishing touch in this picture.

The invoice is the nerve ending of the entire tax system. The moment he issues an invoice, he is actively declaring income to the tax bureau. A clear data point is left in the system: on such-and-such date, this studio sold an API service for X amount. This data automatically feeds into his tax declarations. The income side is precisely recorded, but what about the cost side? Zero. Not a single input invoice. A severe mismatch between input and output—in the tax system, this signal doesn't require manual auditing to be discovered. As a basic risk control metric, the algorithm can flag it in red directly.

By issuing this invoice, he is essentially signing a confession.

What is an invoice, legally? It is black-and-white proof of a business action. It bears his invoice seal, his studio's tax ID, and spells out exactly what he sold. If law enforcement needs to secure evidence, these very receipts are the most direct physical proof. No advanced technical reconnaissance is needed, no complex digital forensics. The records pulled from the tax bureau and the bank are enough to piece together a complete flow of funds and paperwork. He has used the most standard commercial documents to leave the most standard evidence of his business model.

Bigger trouble awaits at the bank. A sole proprietorship account registered in Zhengzhou but opened in Shanghai, frequently receiving scattered payments from businesses and individuals all over the country, and then periodically transferring large sums out. This pattern of capital flow—large volumes in and out, fast money movement, cross-regional accounts—is almost a textbook profile for "abnormal transactions" in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) systems. As he starts invoicing, the frequency and scale of funds moving in and out will rise, meaning he actively feeds more analyzable signals into this system. It's only a matter of time before the account is flagged by risk control, restricted from non-teller transactions, or frozen entirely.

This is the most ironic part of this whole tale: He chose to package himself using the most standard, mainstream commercial practices—registering a sole proprietorship, opening corporate accounts, issuing invoices. Taken individually, each action is legal and compliant, and might even be seen as a sign of "business acumen." But it is precisely these actions that push him into the triple crosshairs of tax audits, legal prosecution, and financial risk control. He used standard methods to dig himself a precision trap.

4. The Structural Mismatch of Risk

The previous three sections dissected the logic of his identity, the black hole of his supply, and the invoicing trap. But all of these lead to one ultimate question: Who bears the risk?

This question separates these grassroots proxy owners from actual gray/black market masterminds.

In a normal illicit supply chain, risk is compartmentalized in layers. The upstream suppliers hide behind anonymous networks and encrypted communications. The intermediate financial channels turn money around using purchased shell identities or companies. The downstream cash-out ends are similarly layered in camouflage. There are firewalls between every level. If any one node is busted, it's hard for the fire to spread to other tiers.

But this sole proprietor sample from Zhengzhou presents an entirely inverted configuration.

He has placed his true identity—the operator name on the business license, his real name tied to his WeChat, the ID card used to open the bank account—directly on the outermost layer of the whole business. It's not a bought shell, not a borrowed name; it is him, personally. From the moment a client wires money to the corporate account for any transaction, a complete chain of evidence is generated: who the payee is, who the operator is, what the ID number is—all of it searchable, traceable, and fully retrievable in under three minutes.

Why would he do this? A reasonable explanation is that he confused two concepts.

He mistook a "Sole Proprietorship" for a "Limited Liability Company" (LLC). In most people's simple intuition, "registering a company" equals "personal assets are protected." If the company goes down, the company takes the hit, and it has nothing to do with the individual. But an LLC is called "limited liability" because it is a legally independent corporate person, responsible for its debts with its own assets. Shareholders only bear losses up to their subscribed capital. If the company goes bankrupt, the fire stops at the desks and chairs in the company's name.

A sole proprietorship is not like that. Under Chinese law, sole proprietorships lack independent corporate personhood. According to Article 56 of the Civil Code of the PRC, the debts of a sole proprietorship operated by an individual shall be borne by their personal property. Translated into plain English: The studio's debt is the site owner's personal debt. It is not limited to the startup capital he put into the studio; it is limited by every piece of personal property under his name.

What does this mean? When a tax audit comes down, discovers a massive input-output mismatch, and demands back taxes and fines, law enforcement can directly freeze his personal bank deposits, Alipay balances, and WeChat wallets. If the debt remains unpaid after these online accounts are drained, next up are real estate and vehicles under his name. After surviving these rounds, there is one final blow: being blacklisted as a "Dishonest Judgement Debtor" (失信被执行人). No high-speed trains, no flights, no loans, and he won't even be able to get a credit card.

This recovery path is not theoretical deduction; it is the most standard operational procedure in China’s civil enforcement process.

Even more worth asking is: By shouldering all this risk, whose business is he taking the fall for? The upstream suppliers hiding in the shadows bear zero legal responsibility and won't share a dime of the fines. This site owner uses his real identity, his entire net worth, and his personal credit score to act as the ultimate risk absorber at the tail end of the supply chain. The upstream makes a guaranteed profit, while the downstream walks on thin ice. This is the practical meaning of the legal concept of "unlimited joint liability" when it crashes into the grassroots proxy business.

This is the most mismatched relationship in the entire story: A side hustle that might only gross a few tens of thousands of RMB a year takes on legal risks completely disproportionate to its revenue—risks severe enough to obliterate a person's entire financial foundation. He isn't running a business. He is gambling. Gambling that he will never be noticed, that the risk control algorithm's threshold will always be slower than he is, and that his little puddle of "deemed taxation" will never run dry.

5. Unmanageable Content Compliance and the "Illegal Business Operations" Red Line

If the input-output mismatch is a slow-burning fuse, then content compliance is an immediate detonator.

In pursuit of extreme cost control, these grassroots proxies rarely possess—and refuse to spend money on—sensitive word filtering and content safety auditing systems (such as text moderation APIs). When their clients use these cheap API endpoints to input or generate politically sensitive, explicit, or terror-related illegal content through foreign large models, regulators will trace the data flows and financial trails upstream. The source will lock directly onto this real-name registered, completely exposed sole proprietor.

When that time comes, he won't be facing back taxes and fines. He will be directly crossing the criminal red lines of the "Cybersecurity Law" and the crime of "Illegal Business Operations" (非法经营罪).

Conclusion: A Gray Market Specimen "Naked in the Sunlight"

The account sample in our investigation—a real-name sole proprietorship, a cross-provincial corporate bank account, a gray business daring enough to issue invoices—ultimately patches together not a tightly organized black-market network diagram, but a staggering portrait of an individual.

He is not a hacker hiding in the dark. He uses zero technical means to conceal his identity. Quite the opposite, he plasters his real identity, business registration, and bank accounts right on the outermost layer, running a business consisting entirely of unmentionable supply chains in a manner akin to streaking naked. The sun shines on him not because he is innocent, but because he walked directly into the sunlight himself.

He attempts to use a compliant toolbox to carry illegal goods. Sole proprietorships, corporate accounts, VAT invoices—these commercial infrastructures meant for legitimate market entities have, in his hands, morphed into a hyper-realistic shell. This shell indeed fools his clients, and perhaps even fools himself for a while. But it cannot fool the input-output comparisons of the tax system, the fund flow analysis of anti-money laundering models, and certainly not the penetrating power contained in the short few dozen words of Article 56 of the Civil Code.

And the result of being penetrated is that he uses his entire savings, real estate, credit history, and future to shoulder unlimited joint liability for an arbitrage game that cost him zero to play.

This is the truest scene at the tail end of the current AI gray market arbitrage chain: it is more grassroots, more amateur, and more fragile than the outside world imagines. It is composed not of omnipotent crime syndicates, but of ordinary people daring enough to set up a stall on the edge of a cliff under their real names. Every single operational step they take leaves a trace; every invoice they issue acts as a footnote for the day of reckoning; every corporate account is standard evidence handed directly to law enforcement.

They are not doing evil in the dark. They are standing in the sun, assuming standard postures, and digging the deepest of graves for themselves. From any angle, this is arguably the most primitive, the most fragile, and the most pitiful existence in this supply chain.

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