your own post says in detail that the US has export restrictions on those countries. this doesn't seem like an arbitrary ruling by OpenAI

it sounds like they are complying with US law

Op probably knows. But thanks for articulating it clearly.

> That means using clear, objective criteria and methods.

For the record, I sent them an LGPD (brazilian GDPR) request for information on all of those supposedly objective criteria and methods they used to reject me from TAC. As a brazilian data subject, it is my right to know that, and to request a review if the decision was made via automated means. Sol itself guided me through this process.

They provided me with neither the information nor the requested review. Sol advised me to escalate to regulatory action.

I've exhausted all possible avenues to get any response from OpenAI on this. Emailed them, published research that took me 2 nights to get together (saw media pick it up too), I've asked every relevant OpenAI person on X to say something, anything, saw others from Moldova also do the same.

Crickets. They appear to simply not care at all.

Is there any reason why OpenAI should care? If they don't want your business then someone in your country can build a competing model.

They do want my business, it's an official OpenAI market. The gate isn't "we don't serve you", it's "pay for the model that may target you, but not for defensive purposes". And without a single policy document stating this, it's just a surprise gate in some random verification flow step with no explanation or appeals.

As for why they should they care, maybe they shouldn't. But then they should say which one is it, they can't care and not care at the same time.

OpenAI's own safety argument for Daybreak is that defenders need access to Critical-level models because attackers route around gates. The case for releasing Astra at all stops making sense when the gate does precisely the opposite of that.

OpenAI itself is saying plainly, that "We don’t think it’s practical or appropriate to centrally decide who gets to defend themselves. Instead, we aim to enable as many legitimate defenders as possible, with access grounded in verification, trust signals, and accountability.".

And yes, there are competing models, from China. Except OpenAI wants these models to not be accessible either.

OpenAI can pick one of two:

(a) Critical-level cyber capability is dangerous enough that access must be decided by who you are and what you do, in which case the gate has to actually look at who I am and what I do, say what the criteria are, and let me contest a wrong answer. That's their own stated policy.

(b) Access can be decided by a country code in a random dropdown, with no criteria published, no review, and no one at OpenAI able to say why - in which case drop "democratized access" and "clear, objective criteria" from the marketing, and say plainly that some passport holders don't deserve to have access to defensive capabilities.

They're now marketing a and doing b.

The reason is they keep making public statements like:

> OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.

They can't claim that then simultaneously work to keep their cybersecurity models out of reach for non-US citizens like myself.

> OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.

It's not unrealistic. Several Chinese companies seem to be close behind. People thought they would never catch up to the US car industry and now look what happened.

To the best of our knowledge, these Chinese companies rely on distillation of frontier models by OpenAI and Anthropic, which isn't a method available at the frontier itself.

I'm not really convinced that there's much secret sauce here, all the methods and data are public, the only real difference is how much compute it takes.

All the methods and data are not public. We don't know what unpublished methods they're using. You can get most of the pre-training data publicly but they've probably spent a ton of money curating it and are now doing things like buying rare books. The RL training data is all (/mostly) proprietary though, and that's the real secret sauce part.

All the RL data are exactly public. There are huge amount of distilled data freely available, and that amount is more than enough to train a ~10T model.

> All the RL data are exactly public.

Nope, because the big AI companies are paying billions for it. They wouldn't pay anything for public data.

There are 'transfer stations' and that's how exactly I use GPT and Claude in China. OpenAI and Anthropic do not sell in China, so we use their AI with a much lower price like 1% of the official API price. The largest transfer stations have TBs of traffic every day, and the traffic is eventually possessed by the open source community.

Subscription engineering is a deep field. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any technical advantage in this field.

everybody do be cooking with water. Chinese Labs provided pretty good, primarily cost-reducing techniques, like the sparse attention patterns recently. I'd bet OpenAI and Anthropic use their variants of those too, so they can get greater margin on their tokens - not something they'd really want to / need to self-report.

This is obviously false. There is "secret sauce" because in fact not all the methods and data are public.

Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then?

Like, (apart from tone), I find it hard to distinguish between the outputs of GPT/Claude/Kimi/GLM recently (I use cursor, and have been giving them the same prompt and comparing).

If anything, I found that the non-Claude models were better in many cases, which definitely doesn't map to their pricing.

> in fact not all the methods and data are public

Probably not, but unless you work at a lab, I'm not sure that anyone can say (and if you do work at a lab, you should not be replying on this thread).

> Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then?

In benchmarks, revenue, and comments from a lot of people on Hacker News.

> revenue

Maybe, I'm not sure this will continue.

> In benchmarks

All published benchmarks are useless, unfortunately.

I'm so confused by the point you're trying to make. There's a lot of rhetoric about Georgia and an investigation about how the country list is 1:1 with some mysterious list from 1996 - but like - it's an export control list? Yeah, Washington approved the sale of missiles to Georgia. That's how that list works. Washington has to approve it. Openai is not Washington. They're perfectly reasonably erring on the side of caution and potentially over-complying with export controls. And if they then have to get approval from the feds to export to Georgia - well - our current administration has provided many reasons to over comply with trade related controls and not exactly been a champion of encouraging cross country trade right now. Idk what you expect from OpenAI or why you think it would matter at all that Georgia is a democracy or an ally of the US or is closely aligned with us. Ask Canada and NATO how much that's counted for with this administration.