Using ChatGPT and Claude in China

There are two separate problems

Almost every guide to this treats it as one problem and tells you to install a VPN. That advice is half right, which is why so many people follow it and still end up staring at a verification loop.

The first problem is that chat.openai.com is unreachable from mainland China. A VPN solves this completely.

The second problem is that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all run their own risk checks on where a request comes from — and they are suspicious of traffic from datacentre IP addresses, which is exactly what nearly every VPN server is. A VPN does not solve this. It can make it worse, because thousands of users share one address and the whole address gets a reputation.

What the second problem looks like

You will recognise it if you have hit it:

• —An endless Cloudflare "Verifying you are human" loop that never completes
• —"Access denied" or error 1020 before the page even loads
• —Signup or login that works, then a request to verify by phone
• —Sessions that log themselves out every few minutes
• —In the worst case, an account suspended for suspicious activity

The last one is the reason to take this seriously rather than just retrying. An account that gets flagged is genuinely hard to recover, and it is tied to your email, not to the connection you happened to use that day.

Why residential IP addresses behave differently

Every IP address belongs to a network, and networks have reputations. An address belonging to a cloud hosting provider is, statistically, far more likely to be a bot than a person — so it gets more scrutiny. An address belonging to a home internet provider looks like a person sitting on a sofa, because usually it is.

This is why a connection can pass every speed test, load every other website perfectly, and still fail at ChatGPT. Nothing is broken. The site simply does not trust where the request is coming from.

How we handle it

We send traffic for AI services — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and a few others — through a dedicated exit that carries AI traffic only and that we test against those sites, while everything else takes the normal fast path. There is nothing to switch on and no separate server to select; it works this way by default, on every plan including the free trial.

The reason for splitting it rather than sending everything that way is reputation. An exit shared by video and downloads from many users quickly starts to look like a bot farm; one kept for AI traffic alone stays clean. Only the traffic that needs the reputation gets it.

Things that are not the VPN's fault

Two problems get blamed on the connection and are not connection problems at all.

Regional availability: OpenAI does not offer service in every country, and that check is based on the billing details and phone number on your account, not on your current IP address. If your account was created in a supported country it keeps working while you travel.

Payment: adding a card to a ChatGPT Plus subscription from abroad can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with your connection, usually your bank declining a foreign online charge. Sort out billing before you travel if you can.

Before you fly

• —Install the VPN app and sign in — VPN sites and the Chinese App Store are not reachable from inside China
• —Sign in to ChatGPT and Claude once, so you are not creating accounts from an unfamiliar location
• —Set a password on your OpenAI account if you normally use "Sign in with Google" — Google sign-in is blocked in China, which can lock you out of the account entirely
• —If you pay for Plus or Pro, confirm the card on file works before you leave