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Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits
138 points by retube 12 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 78 comments
Just frustrated here: I credited my OpenAI API account with credits, and then it turns out I have to go through some verification process to actually use the API, which involves disclosing personal data to some third-party vendor, which I am not prepared to do. So I asked for a refund and am told that that refunds are against their policy.

So I'll be cancelling my chatgpt plus sub, disputing the card payment, and moving to deepseek.

Edit: Deepseek seems to be a lot cheaper than OpenAI

Edit 2: seems verification is only needed for gpt-5, gpt-4o seems to work without it





When they started doing this ID verification early this year, I expressed outrage on here, and was met by comments downplaying it saying "It's a given that soon the others will follow". I'm sure some of those came from people at OpenAI.

We're now at the end of the year and neither Google nor Anthropic nor any single other LLM provider does this. OpenAI does this because their CEO is SamA. That's it.

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A certain business I own has an openai account for testing and research purposes.

What ID would we provide?

Would we pick some random employee to attach to the account?

What relevance does this have to the notion of “piercing the corporate veil” if a business account is tied to someone’s drivers license?

I place the blame for this situation squarely on the careless and thoughtless user population who have blindly provided their phone numbers and now ID scans to any old random, fly by night, start up who request them.

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I assume the correct answer is an officer of the company, the same as for who signs contracts etc

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You can try the latest GLM 4.6 https://z.ai/ . Their coding plan is $6 a month and performs on par to Sonnet 4 for my personal task. Sonnet 4.5 still has an edge though. All of ZLM’s models are also open sourced so you can run it locally if you want

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I am mostly retired but I am thinking of restarting a solo products mini-company next year. I have been looking at much less expensive options like Alibaba Cloud, GLM, Kimi K2, etc. There is a recent Stanford study showing most US startups are using less expensive Chinese models, but I think usually hosted in the US.

For now I am happy enough with Gemini and GPT-5 because my usage is so lite that anything is cheap. For many engineering use cases, Gemini-2.5-flash-lite works well enough.

How do you use GLM? With codex —oss? Or, just ‘raw’ with no agent-wrapping coding environment?

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I use it directly with Claude code [1]. Honestly, it just makes sense IMO to host your own model when you have your own company. You can try something like openrouter for now and then setup your own hardware. Since most of these models are MoE, you dont have to load everything in VRAM. A mixture of a 5090 + EPYC CPU + 256GB of DDR5 RAM can go a very long way. You can unload most of the expert layers onto CPU and leave the rest on GPU. As usual Unsloth has a great page about it [2]

[1] https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude [2] https://docs.unsloth.ai/models/glm-4.6-how-to-run-locally

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Hope you‘ll share your story if you start. Love your book on langchain from iirc 2y ago, it got me going.

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> There is a recent Stanford study showing most US startups are using less expensive Chinese models

link ?

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Idk if this is the reference but it’s in the same direction:

„ These days, when entrepreneurs pitch at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a major Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, there’s a high chance their startups are running on Chinese models. “I’d say there’s an 80% chance they’re using a Chinese open-source model,” notes Martin Casado, a partner at a16z.“ —- https://ixbroker.com/blog/china-is-quietly-overtaking-americ...

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Just searched for their actual policies to corroborate and found the policies on ID verification:

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...

And that credits are nonrefundable:

https://openai.com/policies/service-credit-terms/

It absolutely seems like terrible horrible customer service not to issue refunds in this case. Obviously the credits can still be used for most of the models, so it's not like you can't do anything with them. But if someone explains they bought the credits specifically to use with the verification-gated models and then discovered they couldn't (since apparently verification fails for some people), there's no question that refunds are the right thing to do. What is OpenAI thinking?

(BTW, speculation seems to be that the verification process doesn't have anything to do with know-your-customer laws or anti-fraud, but is intended to prevent competitors like Chinese DeepSeek from having large-scale access to OpenAI's best models.)

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Depending on where the post author is located, whatever says on those links is worth garbage if they are located in Europe.

Most European countries have consumer protection agencies with teeth, and a company cannot decide on their own what they refund or not.

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This may be true, but potentially involves much time, energy, and money by the author to challenge.... so for 99% of people, OpenAI will get away with it

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That's kinda scammy. It's not like they have to manage shipments and handle goods or anything. I wonder if they're banking on a percentage of users leaving credits unused like credit card companies do with loyalty points.

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I don't think they care one way or the other. They haven't ever been profitable, and so they're likely going to build up data and pull the rug on all of their users by suddenly declaring themselves a data broker. They won't try this against companies that can afford to sue, but most of their users will probably start to get even more creepily targeted ads directed at them.

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>(BTW, speculation seems to be that the verification process doesn't have anything to do with know-your-customer laws or anti-fraud, but is intended to prevent competitors like Chinese DeepSeek from having large-scale access to OpenAI's best models.)

It's not because OpenAI's CEO is also the founder of WorldCoin, a project to ID everyone?

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Funny though their KYC process is not done via WorldCoin. Obviously because WorldCoin KYC is useless for authorities.

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Customer service? In the age of AI? What have you been smoking?

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It's hard to know exactly which forms it will end up taking, but dependence on these companies is going nowhere good. And more quickly than it took streaming (for example) to go from offering a better experience (to win market share) to the current (and inevitable) norm of raising prices constantly and introducing unskippable ads.

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I could totally see them having responses sprinkled with subtle marketing. Ask it for the best travel backpack and ooops all sponsored.

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This is already the case for OpenAI. Go ask for some backpack recommendations.

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> and introducing unskippable ads.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but where on either ChatGPT or the API platform OpenAI hosts are you seeing ads?

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> it took streaming...

Parent is comparing OpenAI to other companies that followed a similar trajectory of enshittification.

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Yes, and just as ads eventually came to streaming in a worse form (unskippable, hypertargeted) that cable companies didn't have the ability to innovate, the new frontier of ads will again come with qualitatively worse innovations. Seamless and undisclosed in conversational LLM output.

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If deepseek and qwen are capable why does one need to use OpenAI models? Are their models really that much better? If not the only they bring is the hosting service. N that scenario how long do they have this advantage before aws or Microsoft takes over?

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I wouldn't tie my email to a chatbot let alone my literal goverment ID.

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Wonder how long before they'll have to start reporting 'suspicious activity' to the government same as financial institutions have to do for money transfers.

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You can reasonably assume it is already happening. The only difference is that for FIs it is required by law, that it is relatively similar across the board in terms of implementation and openai is a one giant source of info you wouldn't get anywhere else.

It fairly accurately measured my age, location, place of birth and political inclinations based on our conversations alone. I am certain it can infer a lot more.

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This.

There is no other reason to require KYC for a server-side text transformation tool, no matter how impressive it is.

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Absolutely not. It would require product, engineering, admin, etc. effort to do that and unless it isn't required by law why would they waste the time when they have a lot else to do?

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They have an ex-NSA chief on the board, and doing surveillance voluntarily may result in government help like getting contracts in South-Korea and Argentine that may bring in far more money than the implementation costs. Perhaps they outsource the implementation to Palantir or the NSA. It is basically a simple middleware that is inserted somewhere once the traffic is decrypted.

So I don't think implementation costs are an obstacle.

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> why would they waste the time

Because then the NSA shows up with an NSL, you integrate with the fascist surveillance state or you lose your business. How have people forgotten this so fucking quickly?

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To be fair, I am interested in the subject and I don't even remember the name of the telecom that tried to buck under pressure and went out of business not long after. It has been that long. It is possible so I give people some grace.

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Yeah, I'm not at all willing to do these sorts of verifications. Any company doing them essentially doesn't exist to me. I don't even use Anthropic because they require a phone number to register.

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Same. I don't understand why so many people are happy to give their phone number to some random service provider. It's a shame it has become normalized.

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My phone number is basically public and has been for 20 years, every email I send has my phone number and it's findable via the public internet too.

Not sure why people see their phone number as something private?

FWIW, I've heard some people saying they avoid it because of spam, I've been on my local anti-spam list since I got my current phone number, and receive about 1 spam call every week or something. Maybe there is one for where you live too.

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You're lucky. In my experience no-call lists don't work.

I command a significant budget and even with a lot of effort to not proliferate my phone number, I get at least half a dozen spam or sales calls a day. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I didn't attempt to protect it. Perhaps it would be the same and I should just give up, but I'm not willing to try.

The other side of the coin is that it's just none of their business. They don't need my phone number to sell me SaaS software. There is no upside for me to give it to them.

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> You're lucky. In my experience no-call lists don't work.

I don't think so, I've had friends and acquaintances that had the same issue as you, multiple spam calls per day. I helped them add themselves to their national list, and after a month or two the constant spamming stops.

I think you might just be unlucky living in country that doesn't have such list that works OK. I've lived in multiple different countries so far in my life, and it's been the same thing in all of them, adding myself to the list eventually makes the spam stop.

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I put $2 on my deepseek account and have barely used it, it's so cheap.

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GPT-5 works, just not GPT-5 streaming. I posted about this a little while ago with more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837367

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I thought this was indeed the case at release, but then they changed it to also be for non-streaming (completions). So either they reverted it back or it was a temporary bug during the early days of the model.

When did you last check?

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What is it about streaming specifically that necessitates this? Am I missing something obvious?

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Indeed. I have opened the playground and it doesn't let me choose GPT-5. Obviously I will not be KYCing myself.

But that's okay. There are plenty of other models. Perhaps not bleeding edge great, but great nevertheless.

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As far as I understand, many users are better off with GPT-4o anyway. Amusing to be charging premiums for an objectively bad upgrade, but I guess that's the kind of bullshit economics that hype cycles create.

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I meant competitors

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[dead]


I meant competitors.

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Is it by any chance because your POST is requesting a summary of the reasoning, e.g. setting {summary: "auto"} or somesuch? I know that requires verification.

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Just use openrouter, allows to connect to all models

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OpenRouter has some gotchas with OpenAI models. In some cases it requires an OpenAI key.

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Not anymore, especially after other routers like Vercel's AI Gateway and proxies from LLM providers like Fal, DeepInfra, and AtlasCloud didn't get the memo of enforcing BYOK for ID verification required models after GPT-5's release.

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This is honestly a huge shame as they aren't legally required to do so, this is PURELY for mass data collection and correlation.

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Raise a chargeback

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This - and in future ensure any purchases are made on a credit card not debit card.

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In Europe, SEPA direct debits can also be withdrawn. But you can expect to receive a reminder with legal action within a few days.

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If they broke the contract? Let them come.

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Also terrible that purchased credits expire after 1 year. Not sure how that is legal.

https://community.openai.com/t/api-credits-amount-get-expire...

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Was this for all models?

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I believe it started with o3 Pro, back in the day.

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Good q. I was trying with gpt-5, but it seems gpt-4o works without verification. However 4o is I guess not as good, plus it seems to be twice as expensive as 5

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Gpt $ is the money gpt. I don’t trust the benchmarks and artificial analysis’ benchmarks are bunk.

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They are a porn company now, after all.

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Perhaps this was the reason behind the move.

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In the same sense in which Google is a porn aggregator company because it will return porn results when you ask for them?

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huh? What did I miss?

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"ChatGPT will soon allow erotica for verified adults, says OpenAI boss" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd2qv58yl5o

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"Sam Altman says ChatGPT will soon sext with verified adults"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582874

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No problem. I have zero intention of feeding them or any of their competitors any money, ever. If AI vendors so deeply want to eliminate a path to income for everyone on the planet, let's start with not giving them any income, especially since their intellectual assets are mostly purloined. This is the wave of layoffs that will actually make me happy to hear about. Let Altman, Elmo, Zuck, and all the other similar shitheads starve, like they apparently intend for 99% of humanity.

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Ok, but can you please not fulminate on HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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Yikes

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I understand the anger, but do you really want to live in the world of anarchy that would be required for these people to starve? Because if the billionaires are starving, the rest of us are long gone at that point.

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anarchy isn't required for them to starve. these people could be jailed and their assets frozen, for example, and their jail food would then be stolen by the more physically intimidating inmates. regardless of your political opinions on the subject, this is a perfectly cromulent scenario that includes them starving without there being anarchy.

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"Letting them starve" is clearly rhetorical shorthand for not giving their businesses money. It's based on the irony of the power imbalance, none of these people will ever starve if their businesses fail. Nobody thinks they're going to starve, nobody was intended to take away that literal interpretation, how could you possibly think this interpretation was intended or is worth discussing.

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I guess I was thrown off by “let them starve, the way they want us to”. Doesn’t make much sense if you’re using “starve” to mean totally different things.

Even then, it’s nonsensical to think that you’re going to “starve” these companies of revenue, companies that are growing faster than any in history, bringing in trillions in revenue, and have appreciable fractions of our entire species using them daily.

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To be fair, to them, starving is "other people aren't spending their money on me". Remember Emlo sued people who stopped advertising on his personal blog when he let the Nazis back in.

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One more step towards worldcoin .. .

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[flagged]


It appears that you have quite a few LLM comments going on here. While your customers (as you mention in your profile) may appreciate it, it is typically not looked upon well here. Thank you.

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> ID verification is becoming common across AI platforms

Yikes if true. I wonder why?

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Ironically, it's a hallucination.

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Interesting

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