Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs
Access to frontier large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5, is often hindered by high pricing, payment barriers, and regional restrictions. These limitations drive the proliferation of $\textit{shadow APIs}$, third-party services that claim to provide access to official model services without regional limitations via indirect access. Despite their widespread use, it remains unclear whether shadow APIs deliver outputs consistent with those of the official APIs, raising concerns about the reliability of downstream applications and the validity of research findings that depend on them. In this paper, we present the first systematic audit between official LLM APIs and corre...
| Authors | Yage Zhang, Yukun Jiang, Zeyuan Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 2 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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