On July 9, developers in China will lose API access to all OpenAI platforms, the final step in a slow process of cutting off the country’s access to U.S.-based machine learning tools.
Consumer-facing applications like ChatGPT have been unavailable in China more or less from the beginning. But the API is more important than the consumer-facing applications, powering apps to fill out forms, flag problems in internal data, or manage other kinds of automation at scale. Right now, Chinese developers still have access to those tools, and they’re using them — but they’ve got only a week and a half left.
