It's not _theft_ because nothing is _stolen_. The tokens are being used in a way that breaches the contract agreed to by whomever set up the account with OpenAI, Anthropic, Kilo, Antigravity etc. but it's not theft.
Are we reading the same article? That's mentioned once, as a potential alternative, nested in a bulleted list of alternatives. This is not an article about credit card fraud.
This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).
It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.
It's mostly refunding and card fraud because "bad money drives out good" in any marketplace. It's equivalent to getting a refund on an Amazon package you received, which is why a frontier model is being sold at around 2% of the face value.
Right, theft requires that there be somebody who no longer has access. This is about too many people having access. Piracy might be a more fitting term.
