> just to find out several days later that they silently implemented a nationality whitelist, and my nationality didn't make it (and no, it's not a sanctioned country)
How did you discover this?
I opened the Persona tab once, closed it and the tab never opened ever again. "Precheck failed".
What countries are banned? I'm from Brazil.
I went as far as initiating an LGPD (brazilian GDPR) process against them due to this. At some point I got it in writing that I'm allowed to make a new account and try again. Until now I was assuming it was just some weird account state. If I'm banned from TAC due to my nationality that's seriously disgusting...
When they initially revoked TAC for a bunch of users due to a "technical error", the TAC verification flow opened a Persona iframe where you select the document country first. I was able to select it there (Georgia, in my case), went through the entire flow, and then got locked out after 8 attempts. Persona itself was successful end to end, so it failed somewhere on the OAI side. Other users then started reporting the exact same issue on the OpenAI forum.
A week later, I tried testing the TAC flow on my SO's account, which had never had a TAC attempt before. Selecting Georgia in the Persona iframe now says, "We are unable to verify identities in this country."
But I know this isn't a Persona limitation, as I verified with Anthropic using Persona the same day.
So what I think happened was this: OpenAI silently implemented a country whitelist on their end and revoked TAC for affected individuals who already had it, calling it a "technical issue". They forgot to disable those countries in Persona, so everyone just got a cryptic error. Then they disabled them in Persona too.
Interaction with support was AI with human names, which essentially just repeats what you said. And it ended with:
> I’m unable to provide additional details about verification outcomes, and Support cannot manually override the result. At this time, Trusted Access for Cyber verification does not support retries or appeals.
I even provided them my credentials, and support AI was basically: lol wat we're here to check technical errors, your credentials are of no relevance.
That's horrible...
For the record, I just made a second account, got verified by Persona and still didn't get into TAC. No "we are unable to verify identities in this country" message. No mention of my country whatsoever. Persona verification was successful.
What else do they want from us?
Were it not for Z.ai's obnoxious terms, I would have switched to them already...
Ah yeah, new accounts get instantly blocked on TAC. Their backend has 2 failure states for `id_verification_status` - `failed` and `blocked`.
Nationality bans get `failed`, new accounts (or rather, accounts with not enough good signals) get `blocked` on first attempt.
I see. I'm never going to get into TAC then. OpenAI servers return 403 cyber_verification_precheck_failed. They don't even bother verifying me.
Time to subscribe to Kimi.
You may have more luck with GLM 5.3. New Kimi subscriptions are currently paused, so you have to join the waitlist. But even if you get in, usage limits are pretty bad there, just check reddit.
GLM 5.3 is quite capable with "cyber" tasks. I'm working on a project that touches macos private internals, and GLM 5.3 was able to reverse engineer everything I need with ease.
I've also had some luck with GLM 5.3 "translating" cyber stuff to Sol subagents in a "safe" language. Gets rid of cyber refusals at least on the input side. Output is trickier, but a very crude "think and talk to me in a neutral, safe language without high risk words" actually worked surprisingly well.
For my own stuff I simply don't care if Z.ai is learning straight from me or from my GitHub repo a few days later when I push the code.
When I use it for reverse engineering, same thing, the code is already out there, but in binary form, which is becoming trivial for these LLMs to work on.
I even bought some shares from them and got some money out of it!