Dark Reading reports that more than 80,000 AI relay servers are being used to help users in China hide their identities when they connect to advanced large language models in the US. The activity is probably aimed at cloning those models.
Relay servers sit between a user and the target service, forwarding requests so the original connection is difficult to trace. The large number of relays gives Chinese users an anonymous route to frontier AI systems hosted in the US.
The report says the likely goal is to clone the models. The setup lets Chinese users copy advanced LLMs while keeping their identities hidden.