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Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits

207 points by retube ↗ HN
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

40 comments

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arresin
Was this for all models?
egorfine
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.

Lapra
They are a porn company now, after all.
crazygringo
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.)

mkbkn
Raise a chargeback
throway12345
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.
gdulli
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.
jarym
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.
seneca
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.
syntaxing
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
Kiboneu
One more step towards worldcoin .. .
gidellav
Just use openrouter, allows to connect to all models
comrade1234
I put $2 on my deepseek account and have barely used it, it's so cheap.
pixel_popping
This is honestly a huge shame as they aren't legally required to do so, this is PURELY for mass data collection and correlation.
yalogin
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?
puppycodes
I wouldn't tie my email to a chatbot let alone my literal goverment ID.
rsync
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.

deaux
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.

alganet
That's probably a good thing.