How to Fix: “OpenAI’s API is not available in your country”

31-Jan-2023

OpenAI is a research company based out of the USA and offers API (Application Programming Interface) services that let users leverage the power of AI to perform a wide array of natural language tasks, generate code translated from natural language, and generate and edit images.

The diverse functionality of OpenAI’s API means that it has quickly become popular with companies and developers all over the world since its inception. Unfortunately, however, OpenAI is not equally accessible to everyone. When attempting to access the OpenAI website, some users encounter an error message stating that “OpenAI’s API is not available in your country”.

Naturally, this can be frustrating and a little confusing, so let’s outline why this occurs and what you can do to remedy the situation.

Why is OpenAI’s API not available in my country?

If you received this error message, it means that OpenAI’s API is not supported in your region, and as such you will not be able to access any services provided by OpenAI.

There are many reasons why OpenAI’s API might be restricted to you. Typically, these reasons revolved around international relations, laws, and data security. In cases where a ban or sanction has been placed upon your country of location, you will encounter this error message.

What countries is OpenAI available in?

As an organization, OpenAI places a high value on geographic diversity and endeavors to reach as many people as possible with its services.

OpenAI is supported in a wide variety of countries in virtually every region of the world, and the list of countries is continually growing. The following is a complete list of places where OpenAI’s API is currently available to the public:

How do I get access to OpenAI?

In order to gain access to OpenAI’s services, you will need to bypass the geographical restrictions that have been imposed upon the country where you reside. To do this, you will need a virtual private network to help you spoof your IP location.

Fortunately, it is relatively simple to do this, and you can complete the process without spending a penny by using Urban VPN’s free premium VPN to help you change your location.

To complete this process, you will need an email address and a phone number from a country where OpenAI is supported. If you don’t have such a phone number, you can obtain a temporary number online. There are a wide variety of free and paid services which offer this. Likewise, there are similar services that provide temporary email addresses if you are reluctant to use your personal address.

Accessing OpenAI with a VPN

Once you have installed Urban VPN on your device, you can use it to access OpenAI by following the instructions below:

Step 1: Connect to a VPN server

Open your VPN application and locate a server in a country where OpenAI is supported. We will use “United States” as our server of choice in this example.

In your browser, open a private browsing window and go to the OpenAI API page. You should now be able to access the page without any issues.

Step 2: Sign up for OpenAI

In the top right corner of the page, you will see the “sign up” button. Click this, and you can begin the account creation process.

Step 3: Provide an email address & password

Here, you will be asked to provide an email address. You may use your own address, or alternatively, you can create a temporary address using a website such as temp-mail.org.

Enter your chosen email address into the provided field on the OpenAI sign-up page, complete the CAPTCHA and click “continue”. Then, create your password and click “continue” a second time.

You will receive a confirmation email with a link to verify your address. If you have used a temporary address, this email will be visible on the website where it was generated.

Step 4: Provide a phone number

Finally, you will be asked to provide a phone number for your account. As with your email address, you can choose to create a temporary number. For this, you can use temp-mail.org’s paid service or a free alternative of your choosing.

Copy your phone number into the provided field and press “send code”. This will send an SMS code to the given number, which you can use for verification.

Complete this final step and the process is done. Now, you can safely access OpenAI’s API without issue.

The wrap-up

OpenAI’s API is an extremely useful service, so it can be extremely frustrating to find that it is inaccessible to you. Fortunately, by installing Urban VPN and following the simple steps above, you can bypass geographical restrictions and gain access to all of the services that OpenAI has to offe.