Reaching AI services from restricted countriesBlocked at both ends, which changes the answer

AI assistants are restricted in an unusual way, and it changes what a VPN has to do. In most geo-blocking, one side does the blocking: the service checks your country. Here both sides do.

Some countries filter the traffic at the network level. Separately, the services themselves publish country lists and decline connections from regions they do not support. A VPN that gets you past the first can still land you somewhere the second refuses.

• The country may filter it; the service may also refuse your region
• Both have to clear, so the exit country is part of the problem
• Hong Kong is a common exit that several AI services do not support
• Japan and Singapore are the reliable exits from East Asia
• The account's own country is separate again, and a VPN does not change it

Why the usual advice fails here

The standard instruction — connect somewhere else and try again — assumes any "somewhere else" will do. For AI services it does not. If you connect through a region the service itself does not support, you get the same refusal you started with, from a different direction.

Hong Kong is the clearest example. It is the shortest and most common exit for connections out of mainland China, every provider we track has a location there, and several AI services do not support it. People connect, see the same error, and conclude the VPN failed.

Japan and Singapore are the useful exits from East Asia: close, fast, supported by the services, and covered by all seven providers we track — with four of them publishing two or more Japanese cities.

What determines whether it works

Three things have to agree, and only one of them is the network.

• The route. Can your traffic leave at all? This is what obfuscation is for in countries that filter — four of the five providers publishing a feature list name it.
• The exit country. Is it on the service's supported list? This is the one people miss.
• The account. Some services record the country at sign-up and check it later. That is a record, not an address, and no VPN alters it.

Diagnosing which of the three is failing saves a great deal of time. A network timeout, a region-not-supported message and an account-level refusal look different, and each points at a different fix.

Setting it up before you need it

In the countries where AI services are restricted, provider websites are frequently restricted too. That means signing up, installing and signing in has to happen before you arrive — the same rule as everything else in a filtered country, and the same reason it is the most common failure.

It is also worth creating the AI service account before travelling, for the same reason: sign-up flows are where country checks are strictest, and doing that step on an unfiltered connection removes one variable.

A note on what we can and cannot tell you here

Country support lists for AI services change, sometimes without an announcement, and we do not track them the way we track VPN server locations. What we collect daily is the VPN side: which providers publish a location in each of 155 countries, and how many cities they have there.

So the honest division is this. We can tell you with confidence which providers can give you an address in Japan or Singapore today, because we counted this morning. We cannot tell you with the same confidence which regions a given AI service supports this week, and we would rather say so than publish a list that was accurate when it was written.

Speed, and why it matters less here than you would think

Conversational AI sends and receives small amounts of text, so throughput is not the constraint that it is for video. Our measurements — 40% to 90% of a raw line surviving — are comfortably enough for this even at the bottom of that range.

What does show up is latency on a long route: responses feel slower to start, though the total time changes little. If you are choosing between a nearby supported exit and a distant one, take the nearby one.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The providers we track

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

Frequently asked questions

Why do I still get an error with the VPN on?

Almost always because the exit country is not on the service's supported list. Change to a country you know is supported before changing anything else.

Is it against the rules?

Connecting from an unsupported region is generally against the service's terms of use. The consequence is an account measure rather than a legal one, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are risking.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

What is a VPN, in one paragraph?

A VPN is an encrypted connection between your device and a server run by the provider. Everything you send goes through that tunnel, so the network you are sitting on sees only an encrypted link to one address, and the sites you open see the server's address rather than yours. That is the entire mechanism; the differences between providers are about where the servers are, how fast the route is, and what the provider keeps.

Conclusion

Two-sided restrictions need a two-sided answer: a route out, and an exit country the service actually supports. Hong Kong satisfies the first and frequently not the second.

Our per-country server counts are collected daily, so the exit options here are current rather than remembered.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.