Russia May Have Begun Blocking ChatGPT
- 7.09.2026, 12:26
Complaints about access issues have been coming in since September 6 from 27 regions.
Russian users have begun complaining about problems accessing the popular artificial intelligence service ChatGPT, according to data from Detector404. Complaints have been coming in since September 6 from 27 regions, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Samara Region, Udmurtia, Tatarstan, and others. Users are complaining that the website and app are unavailable and that they are having trouble logging into their accounts. A user named Maxim reported that “ChatGPT has been blocked in Russia,” as noted by the website The Moscow Times.
The problem did not originate on ChatGPT’s end, according to the industry IT resource Comss. The connection to the service’s main website, chatgpt.com, is interrupted before the request reaches the company’s servers. Comss staff conducted tests from five connection points in Russia. In all cases, the connection to chatgpt.com was interrupted during the secure connection establishment phase (TLS handshake). However, other ChatGPT addresses (such as openai.com) remained accessible.
ChatGPT is a project by OpenAI, which was founded in 2015. The first version was released in November 2022 and gained 1 million users in five days. By 2026, the company had more than 500 million registered accounts. Russia is not included in the list of countries and territories where OpenAI supports the service.
OpenAI had previously blocked accounts linked to Russian disinformation campaigns. In 2024, the company announced that it had shut down the “Doppelganger” and “Bad Grammar” operations. Their participants used ChatGPT to create posts and comments about Ukraine, the United States, Moldova, and the Baltic states. In February 2026, OpenAI suspended accounts associated with the “Rybary” project, which is linked to the Russian military. The accounts used ChatGPT to create posts and comments in Russian, English, and Spanish. In August 2026, the company announced that it had blocked a group of accounts from Russia that were used to promote the fictitious International Burke Institute. The institute promoted pro-Russian content purportedly from the Israeli expert community.