Why is OpenAI API not supported in certain countries?

API
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Hi OpenAI Community!

  • What is the cause of the restriction to certain countries of OpenAI?
  • If I have been a Beta user for a long time, but now I am in an unsupported country, then I will not be able to use it either?

https://beta.openai.com/docs/supported-countries

:thinking: I ask this because I’ve had recent problems setting up my payment account for the OpenAI API, and I suspect it’s related to the country restriction. It may sound very obvious, but it’s strange because in the months that I had the Beta, it worked very well.

Also I’m from Peru.

:heart: In any case, I hope that soon the OpenAI team will be able to expand it to more countries in the future. GPT-3 also captured my country’s information very well

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Export laws, namely to do with information security. Some nations, such as China, have been declared as security risks and so in order to do business in those countries, you need isolated computer systems, which are expensive to set up and maintain.

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Interesting. So, if I understand correctly, is it due to the security infrastructure of the governments?

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No it has more to do with industrial espionage and national intelligence spying. Export laws require private companies to create strong partitions that prevent hostile nations from stealing data, military secrets, and so on. Pretty much anything that has to do with cryptography and artificial intelligence falls under these rules.

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I begin to understand why. :cry:

I hope it will be resolved soon. Thanks for your answer @daveshapautomator!

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I hope that more precise information will be provided or the list of allowed countries will be expanded soon. Especially for Latin America, where some countries are already allowed.

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Yes @Abel1011 definitely :slightly_frowning_face:.

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So in short all good staff is banned in 3rd world. keep the poor countries poorer. tell me bro, how are the people or the gov’t of Togo, Vietnam, Peru or Ethiopia etc hostile and are kept in the west’s black list whether the gov’t in these countries is friendly to the west or not? And how come there is no western nation in this “Hostile” list?

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They just remove the ban from Peru a couple of weeks ago.

I’m not sure if the ban still exists in some countries.

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How are poor countries that can’t even feed their people write considered hostile bro I don’t get it?

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I am from Azerbaijan, and it does not support my country either, but it does our neighbor Turkey, are we more dangerous than Turkey? I don’t think so

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The clipping of allowed countries is very strange.

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I have been using OpenAI ChatGDP today and suddenly Cambodia is no longer supported. Very disappointed in the morals of this AI organisation!!!

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AFAIK in South America Paraguay is banned, but there are no restriction to this country. Why is still banned?

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I know. The same thing happened to me with Peru, but eventually they enabled it again.

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I’m from Cambodia, it’s doesn’t support here as well

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paraguay is one the most corrupt and insecure countries in the world, perhaps its for that

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its weird how they choose to block some countries, its mostly political i think and not about laws or anything

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add Paraguay to that list, we are block FOR NO REASON; we are literally the lapdog of US gov and they blocked us anyway

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It’s also not supported in Saudi Arabia, very weird. I really want to know why though?