Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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.




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.


This.

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


The other reason could be the copyright cases they are fighting in court. OAI was ordered to keep all records, including private. Not sure if it was lifted already.

And another could be EU requirements for age verification. AI can produce adult content.

There are may be other reasons, like to prevent using OAI models' output to train competing models.


> AI can produce adult content.

They should realize that anything can produce adult content. Anything.


No other reason? What about simply fraud protection. The same reason they switched new accounts to be where you have to pay to buy credits first instead of paying at the end of the month. There is a ton of fraud in this industry

No worries. Their competitors do not require KYC.

They all require paying for credits up front which is also an anti-fraud measure though which was my entire point ;)

Credit upfront as antifraud: perfectly fine. KYC: absolutely not.

And if you ran a company at OpenAI's scale then you can make that decision, but you don't

How much do you know about me?

Anyways, competitors do not require KYC for text transformation services, and that's how it should be.


You call OpenAI a "text transformation service" so clearly you are incompetent and your website backs that up

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

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?

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.


> 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?


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.

Did you miss where I said "unless it is required by law"

That's point: it is always required by law. There is no case where it is not required by law.

I'd have sworn they've already admitted to this



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: