OpenAI will soon require enterprise users to provide government ID to access ChatGPT's API
This is meant to fight against the misuse of Artificial Intelligence
January this year was a wild one for AI. That’s when DeepSeek burst onto the scene with a powerful new model out of China that surprised the industry with how much it could do, and how quickly. At the time of its release, it outperformed almost every AI chatbot in various benchmarks and tests. It seemed like a massive leap forward.
But not long after its breakout moment, OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — dropped a surprising allegation: it had evidence that DeepSeek may have trained its model using data scraped through OpenAI’s API.
Oyinebiladou Omemu
According to Bloomberg, a group linked to DeepSeek may have used OpenAI’s API to gather data for training their own models—potentially violating OpenAI’s terms. While OpenAI hasn’t shared concrete details, the timing of its latest move suggests it’s taking steps to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The company is now rolling out a new security layer called Verified Organization — a formal ID-based verification process that will soon be required to access certain future models. It’s not just a formality. Organizations will need to submit a government-issued ID, and the same ID can only be used to verify one organization every 90 days.
While it’s clearly a response to possible misuse, it also helps with broader security concerns. OpenAI says a small but persistent group of developers has been intentionally breaking the rules, and this system is designed to keep them out, without shutting the door on everyday users or smaller dev teams. For now, most API access stays the same, but if you want to work with the most advanced models OpenAI has to offer, verification may soon be non-negotiable.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
It’s a big move from the biggest name in AI. ChatGPT now serves over 2 million businesses, according to eMarketer, while Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude are still far behind in enterprise adoption. Add to that its recent record-breaking $300 million funding round, and it’s clear that OpenAI is leading the pack.
With all this together, OpenAI is arguably setting the pace for other AI giants to follow. It would be interesting to see if this new verification system gets adopted by other companies and becomes an industry standard or if this just remeains reserved for OpenAI.
Louis Eriakha
