Using Claude/GPT/Gemini from China: a compliance checklist
Using Claude, GPT, or Gemini from inside a Chinese company involves more than just “does the API call reach the endpoint.” Payment, invoicing, foreign-exchange rules, and accounting all sit on top of the technical layer. This is the compliance checklist we wish we had when we started.
Why this matters even if you are tiny
For an indie hacker spending $30/month on the OpenAI API, none of this matters. Your bank doesn’t care.
The threshold where it suddenly matters is somewhere around the first of these milestones, whichever comes first:
- You incorporate (个体户 / 有限公司) and need to deduct API spend as a business expense for tax.
- Spend exceeds a few hundred USD/month and you want to pay from a corporate card rather than personal.
- You take outside investment and the investor’s due-diligence team asks for invoices for all SaaS spend.
- You serve enterprise customers in China who require Chinese-compliant invoicing (增值税专用发票 / 普通发票).
Hit any of those and the Stripe-charges-your-Visa flow stops being adequate. Below are the specific things you need to know.
Payment: what actually works from China
| Method | Direct to OpenAI/Anthropic? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| International credit card (Visa/MC issued abroad) | Yes, if you have one | Cleanest path but most Chinese-issued cards are rejected by Stripe. |
| Mainland China bank card | No | Stripe explicitly blocks Chinese-issued cards for these merchants. |
| Virtual card (Depay/Wildcard) | Sometimes | Works for OpenAI most of the time; rejected by Anthropic increasingly often in 2026. |
| Crypto (USDT) | Indirect | Via reseller gateways. You convert RMB → USDT → top-up credits. |
| RMB to a Chinese-domestic reseller | No, indirect | What most Chinese teams actually do. Pay in RMB, get an invoice in RMB, gateway routes upstream. |
Invoicing: what your accountant actually needs
Chinese accounting rules require an invoice (发票) for any business expense you want to deduct. Two main types:
普通发票 (general invoice)
Suitable for most small/medium expenses. Issued by the seller in RMB. The buyer’s tax ID (统一社会信用代码) goes on the invoice. Sufficient for booking an expense; cannot be used to deduct input VAT.
增值税专用发票 (VAT special invoice)
Required if you want to deduct the 6% VAT on services. Requires the seller to be a 一般纳税人 (general VAT taxpayer, not a small-scale one). Process is identical to 普通发票 but the document carries the 6% VAT line and a special invoice number.
What you cannot use
- A Stripe credit-card receipt in USD. Accountants will not accept it as a 发票.
- A PDF marked “Invoice” in English. Same problem.
- A USDT transaction hash. Worse than nothing for tax purposes.
Foreign exchange: the part nobody warns you about
If you pay OpenAI in USD from a Chinese-issued international card, you trigger a foreign-exchange transaction. Personal cards have an annual quota ($50K USD equivalent under SAFE rules), and corporate cards have separate paperwork requirements.
Most Chinese teams hit one of two walls:
- Personal-card quota exhaustion when API spend goes industrial.
- Corporate forex requires bank pre-approval and documentation per transaction. Practical only at large scale.
Paying a Chinese-domestic reseller in RMB sidesteps both. The reseller has done the forex once at wholesale scale; you pay them in RMB and they handle the cross-border math.
Data residency and content policy
Worth saying clearly: routing through a Chinese-domestic gateway does not mean your prompts are governed by Chinese content rules. The model still runs on OpenAI/Anthropic infrastructure outside mainland China. What changes:
- The gateway sees your prompt in transit (same as any reseller).
- Logs may be stored in mainland China, depending on the gateway’s server choice.
- If you process Chinese personal data, the gateway’s logging policy becomes a PIPL compliance touchpoint.
Read the gateway’s data-handling docs before sending anything sensitive. The good ones publish retention policy, encryption-at-rest details, and which jurisdictions logs sit in.
The actual checklist
For a team that is past the “personal Stripe card” phase:
- Identify your spend tier. Under $200/month? Stay on the international card. Over that, look at RMB resellers.
- Confirm invoice type. If you need to deduct VAT, confirm 增值税专用发票 availability before committing. Get the first sample invoice before scaling spend.
- Match invoice items to your accounting category. “技术服务费” or “软件服务费” is typically what your accountant will book against.
- Get a tax-ID-on-file process. A good reseller lets you store your 统一社会信用代码 once and auto-fills every invoice. Manually typing it for each top-up is a real workflow tax.
- Reconcile monthly. Pull a usage CSV from your reseller, match line items to invoices, archive both in your accounting system. Doing this early makes year-end audits trivial.
- Stress-test customer service.Email the reseller asking for a duplicate invoice or refund. Response time and tone tell you what you’ll get when something goes wrong in production.
Red flags when choosing a reseller
- No business entity disclosed. If you cannot find their 工商注册信息, your invoices are worthless.
- Discounted rates “sourced from special channels.” In 2026 this almost always means grey-market upstream keys that will be revoked, taking your prepaid credits with them.
- RMB-only checkout but no 发票 option at signup. They probably can’t issue compliant invoices at all.
- Pricing materially below the upstream wholesale rate. The math doesn’t work; somebody is going to eat the loss, and it’s usually customers via service degradation.
Closing
The technical bar for using foreign AI APIs from China is low. The compliance bar is what surprises teams a quarter into building. Get the invoice and payment path right early — it’s much easier than back-filling a year of receipts during a tax inspection.
ApiLink was built for exactly this: RMB-denominated, 增值税专用发票 on every top-up, real entity disclosure, no grey-market upstream. If you’re hitting any of the walls above, we’re an honest option to evaluate.