Every country where ChatGPT is banned and why

AI is taking over the world. right? Well, not quite yet..

While millions of people are using ChatGPT to write their emails, cheat on assignments, and argue with a chatbot at 2am, there are tens of millions of people who can't access it at all because their governments won't let them.

Here's a comprehensive list of every country where ChatGPT is banned or blocked, along with the actual reasons behind these restrictions.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching 100 million users in just two months.

Businesses rushed to use it for customer service, decision-making, and automation. But not every country welcomed it with open arms.

Which countries have banned ChatGPT?

Today, ChatGPT is blocked or restricted in 25 countries, while 172 nations have access. So who's banning it, and why?

The biggest names on the blocklist are outright government bans.

Putin and XI have said no to ChatGPT (Photo by ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

China and Russia have both blocked ChatGPT entirely.

China's ban fits into its well established "Great Firewall" strategy of controlling its 1.4 billion citizens can access online. Russia has been tightening its grip on internet access since its invasion of Ukraine.

The full government block list also includes:

• Iran
• North Korea
• Cuba
• Syria
• Afghanistan
• Yemen
• Sudan
• Libya
• Chad
• Burundi
• South Sudan
• The Central African Republic
• DR Congo
• Eritrea
• Eswatini
• Bhutan

What two things do these countries have in common?

Authoritarian governments and a complicated relationship with the USA are the second most cited reasons why ChatGPT isn't available globally.

Where is ChatGPT restricted?

There are also countries where access is restricted, rather than blocked:

• Ethiopia
• Egypt
• Myanmar
• Venezuela
• Somalia
• Belarus

Perhaps not coincidentally, these are all countries where internet freedom is already heavily restricted.

It's not always banned for political reasons. Even countries that allow ChatGPT have raised serious concerns about it, and some of those concerns are pretty valid.

The big issues are misinformation, data privacy and bias.

ChatGPT can get things badly wrong, a phenomenon known as 'AI Hallucination', where it confidently produces information that is completely false.

Ask it the same question twice, and you might get two different answers.

AI hallucinations can be expensive - just ask Google's Bard (Photo by Abdullah Guclu/Anadolu via Getty Images)

And these hallucinations can be really costly.

As reported by the BBC, in a February 2023 public demo, Google's Bard chatbot was asked about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Bard stated that the JWST "took the very first pictures of a planet outside our own solar system". Unfortunately, the first photo was taken 16 years earlier by the Very Large Telescope.

This error led to a $100 billion market value drop in Alphabet shares. Ouch.