Simon Willison on the Relay Market: an Entire Economy Now Profits From Finding Your Unprotected LLM Endpoint
Matt Lenhard's investigation for Vectoral, sourced principally from a Chinese-language V2ex thread, maps the resale market where operators pool LLM credentials and undercut official API pricing — margins coming from abused free trials, unprotected support bots, stolen cards, and chargeback fraud. The infrastructure is two open-source proxies built for legitimate load-balancing across credential pools, one-api and its fork new-api. Willison's builder takeaway is the sharp part: he has long been cautious about exposing LLM apps publicly, and this changes the threat model because 'there's now an entire ecosystem that can profit from finding a new unprotected endpoint to exploit' — his ask of vendors is strict per-key spending caps scoped to specific time periods.
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