// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The AI Credit Resale Economy
This is a follow-up article to a piece I recently wrote about the token relay market. Noticeably absent from that piece was a mention of the rise of “token brokers” — people who buy unused credits from startups and then resell them.
I first heard about token brokers while chatting with a good friend of mine who was receiving offers for Anthropic tokens at steep discounts.
It wasn’t just him, though. As I started talking to more founders about what I was building, they said the same thing: they were getting a lot of inbound email from people looking to buy or sell off-market inference.
Startups swapping credits is nothing new, and I knew this was happening in several startup forums and groups, but this was when I realized that the market was being commercialized.
So I did what any normal person would do. I got the brokers’ email addresses and started emailing them to learn more.
Before my own outreach, it’s worth seeing what founders are actually receiving. Both of these were forwarded to me by friends.
I started by sourcing a few email addresses from friends. The first two emails I sent bounced, but the third was a hit. Here’s a screenshot of that conversation:
What’s interesting is the amount of supply. The seller was offering $100k in spend per day.
They aren’t handing out the provider keys directly; instead, they act as a proxy that probably picks from a pool of keys and forwards the request.
There are a few websites promoting credit brokering as well. One of them, AI Credits, bills itself as a credit marketplace. For another flavor of the pure-play credit reseller marketplaces, take a look at AICreditMart.