How fraudulent AWS accounts feed a Claude distillation market
It seems AWS' Kiro IDE gives free access to trial accounts using Claude as the backend model, and Chinese hackers are exploiting this as a way to offer cheap distillation-capable LLM API access:
The accounts this tool makes have a name in these channels: kiro, after the IDE they sign into. Buyers’ messages show these are the same free AWS Builder ID accounts: they ask how to log into a kiro account “with the Builder ID”.
Across these channels, mentions of kiro climbed from a few hundred a month in spring 2026 to tens of thousands a month by midsummer.
Kiro moves through a layered market:
Farmers mass-create the accounts Relay operators source them and pool them into shared key groups These relays sell discounted Claude API access Buyers downstream are promised distillation-capable API access, or even bulk-usage dataRelay sellers quote prices as a multiple of Anthropic’s API rate: 1× is the official price and kiro runs at 0.06× (Figure 1).
Interesting to see that distillation is a key feature -- there must be a lot of Chinese LLM users attempting to copy training data from Claude....
(via Last Week in AWS)
Tags: via:lwia distillation llms security infosec china kiro aws claude scraping