OpenAI to pull plug on 'unsupported' nations – cough, China – from July 9
- Reference: 1719342908
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/06/25/openai_unsupported_countries/
- Source link:
The email, reproduced on the OpenAI community forum [1]here , includes a brief statement. "Our data shows that your organization has API traffic from a region that OpenAI does not currently support," it reads. "We will be taking additional measures to block API traffic from regions that are not on our supported countries and territories list starting on July 9."
"To continue using OpenAI's services, you will need to access the service in a supported region," it concludes.
[2]
Much of the world has access to OpenAI including virtually the entire West, most of Eastern Europe, South Asia, and about half of Africa. However, there are some notable absences on the [3]list such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and mainland China.
[4]
[5]
OpenAI's [6]full list of supported countries does not include China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia.
The four countries have all been on OpenAI's radar for some time now. In February, the AI company announced it had [7]shut down accounts it claims were used by "state-affiliated malicious actors" from the four countries, saying they had used ChatGPT to help with phishing attacks and developing malware. Last month, OpenAI cracked down on another group of accounts, [8]this time from China, Russia, Iran, and Israel .
[9]
However, rising tensions between the US and China could be a motivating factor in OpenAI's decision to crack down on unsupported users. The US has levied sanctions and tariffs against China since the Trump administration including [10]President Biden's increased tariffs on Chinese chips, batteries, and electric vehicles.
[11]Alibaba Cloud unleashes thousands of Chinese AI models to the world
[12]Anthropic delivers Claude 3.5 model – and a new way to work with chatbots
[13]OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new startup aims to create 'safe superintelligence'
[14]Elon Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit without explaining why
In response, China has ramped up efforts to achieve technological autarky, mandating its telecommunications firms to [15]stop using CPUs from Intel and AMD by 2027 , and for its car manufacturers to buy [16]at least a quarter of their computer processors domestically by 2025 .
We asked OpenAI about the consequences for users in unsupported regions, but have not yet heard back.
The impact of OpenAI enforcing its list of supported (and unsupported) countries would undoubtedly have a negative impact on developers in China, though it might cut both ways. Users of cloud platform firm Vercel, which is based in the US, apparently received the very same OpenAI email if they were accessing OpenAI via Vercel's edge network, according to a [17]Reddit post.
It's not clear whether the email was sent in error, but Vercel's edge network does have a region based in Hong Kong, which, like mainland China, is unsupported. OpenAI may no longer run on Vercel's Hong Kong servers, potentially affecting users.
[18]
The Register asked Vercel for clarification, but the company did not respond. ®
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[1] https://community.openai.com/t/identifying-api-keys-with-traffic-from-unsupported-regions/837837
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zns9932I2zNRPMmDxkRXXgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://platform.openai.com/docs/supported-countries
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zns9932I2zNRPMmDxkRXXgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zns9932I2zNRPMmDxkRXXgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://platform.openai.com/docs/supported-countries
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/openai_microsoft_spying/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/30/openai_stops_five_ineffective_ai/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zns9932I2zNRPMmDxkRXXgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/15/us_china_tariff_hikes/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/25/alibaba_modelscope_english_translation/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/anthropic_claude_35/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/ilya_sutskever_safe_superintelligence/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/musk_vs_openai_case_ended/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/13/china_telco_chips/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/17/china_sets_goal_for_local/
[17] https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1dnic3p/our_data_shows_that_your_organization_has_api/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zns9932I2zNRPMmDxkRXXgAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: OpenAI
You should understand the Open in OpenAI in a similar vain as the meaning of "DPRK/Democratic People's Republic of Korea". It's not democratic, it's not of the people, it's not a republic. It is on the Korean peninsula though.
So in a way the DPRK has one up on OpenAI, because while the DPRK is indeed on the Korean peninsula (so they get 1 point for that), OpenAI is neither Open, nor Artificially Intelligent (zero points).
Icon is me checking for where I left my [1]VX antidote .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam
DigitalOcean, AWS, Azure, Oracle, and all other cloud providers will gladly take their money
Great, they'll just use some VM's located in those supported nations then... they may even spin instances up and then down on a minute-by-minute basis to prevent blockage.
If they'd really wanted to disrupt bad usage by those actors, they'd take a different approach: continue to allow access to the API, yet silently/surreptitiously watermark the content generated for those unsupported nations so that it betrays it's AI-generated provenance. Maybe even watermark it enough so that you can trace it down to who generated it (after all, an API authenticates and authorizes its users, right?). That would give you a much better intelligence picture of who is using you to do what kind of thing. Once you know that, then you may be able to take more meaningful action, rather than block country/AS-level ranges and hoping that those regions won't come back to you from assets within the supported nations, while claiming that "something must be done, this is something, so doing this is the right thing".
In fact, come to think of it, I'm somewhat curious whether there is any kind of watermarking or tracking that is done on their AI slop which enables someone to track back the slop to the original requestor of the slop regardless of the requester's geographical origin... (in other words: is all AI slop watermarked or tagged somehow so that it can be tracked back to the original requester?)
OpenAI
Neither open or AI. I suppose "Restricted ML" doesn't have the same ring to it.