[Matt Lenhard] has an interesting writeup explaining exactly how fraudsters offer access to cutting-edge AI models at a tenth of the price. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the secret is to get tokens for free from anywhere they can and by any means necessary. Then wrap them in a pretty relay API, and sell access to it.

Relaying tokens is not by itself a shady practice. That distinction belongs to services that obtain tokens fraudulently, opening the door to selling them at rates far below market value. This practice is widespread and profitable, in part because the abuse is so hard to pin down and stop.

One source of tokens is free credits on new accounts. New accounts are spooled up as fast as possible, hammered until they’re empty, then it’s done all over again. Another method is to sign up as pay-after, possibly with a stolen card, and simply ensure the account has no valid payment method once the bill comes due. Or set up a temporary card, pay some minimum up front and consume as much as possible, then initiate a chargeback. It doesn’t matter if individually each of these doesn’t amount to much before they get flagged, because it’s being leveraged relentlessly on a massive scale by automated systems.

There are the shadier methods, too. Fraudsters don’t just target providers directly. Consumer software products with AI features get reverse-engineered, then the back ends hammered for all they are worth. Poorly-coded support chatbots can be highjacked into serving fraudsters’ traffic instead of just their own. It doesn’t actually matter where the tokens come from, after all. As long as the fraudsters are obtaining them for free (or at least below their costs) then it’s profit.

That last point is one [Matt] zeroes in on with advice on how to mitigate this abuse. He goes into detail in his writeup but what it comes down to is recognizing that it’s a numbers game. Fraudsters depend entirely on obtaining tokens for free, or nearly free. So just like using an AI to keep phone scammers tied up, anything that raises friction increases the fraudster’s costs, in turn encouraging them to find an easier target.

Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery.

In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation—the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.

Antibodies are useful in the lab because the immune system generates them to recognize specific proteins. While those proteins typically appear on the surface of pathogens, the immune system doesn't know where a given protein it encounters comes from. So, if you inject an animal with your protein of interest, it will typically generate antibodies to recognize that.

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