OpenAI blocked ChatGPT in Ukraine in order ‘not to violate the sanctions that have been applied to the annexed Crimea since 2014 / ‘LDNR’
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has blocked Ukrainians from accessing its text-based AI chatbot. According to the company, this was done due to sanctions that also apply to the Russian-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions, as well as the annexed Crimea.
This is stated in the letter received by the Ministry of Digitization from OpenAI.
“Because of the sanctions, they should block the “LDNR”/Crimea. They don’t know how to distinguish them from customers from the rest of Ukraine,” said Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov in a comment to the Ukrainian publication Forbes.
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence laboratory launched a few years ago with the financial support of Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs. The bot works on the basis of a “big language model” — artificial intelligence software that has been trained to predict the next word in a sentence by analyzing huge volumes of Internet text and finding patterns through trial and error.
Since its launch, the free version of the chatbot has been very popular — it had more than 1 million users in its first week. However, access to it is limited in some countries — in particular, in Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and… Ukraine.
The Ministry of Digitization sent an appeal to OpenAI, but has not yet shared a copy of the response with journalists. So far, persistent Ukrainians have started looking for workarounds to use AI technologies (VPN, registration through an American/European number or access through the services of third-party publishers).
According to insiders, Microsoft is seriously interested in OpenAI AI technologies and is in talks to invest $10 billion in the startup. The funding, joined by other venture capital firms, will value OpenAI at $29 billion. Microsoft previously announced that it would integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and make the chatbot publicly available on its Azure cloud service.
