AI Services Censorship ReportApril 2026 — what AI is reachable from where

Methodology

Finding 1 — Country × service matrix

23 countries show some form of restriction on at least one of the five tracked AI services. Sorted by hard blocks first, then by total restricted services.

Finding 2 — Most-restricted services

Number of countries in which each AI service shows blocking or interference signals (anomaly rate > 0). Bars are ranked descending.

Gemini's broader footprint reflects two effects: it shares Google's *.google.com certificate chain (so it is collateral damage in some Google-blocking regimes), and it is the only one of the five tracked services with hard blocks confirmed in two countries (China, plus partial blocks in Armenia, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan). Anthropic's claude.ai, by contrast, is on a standalone domain and an Anthropic-controlled certificate, which appears to insulate it from blanket "block all of Google" DNS rules.

Finding 3 — Vendor asymmetries

Finding 4 — Blocking method breakdown

Of the 233 block/interference events in this dataset, OONI's web_connectivity test reports an anomaly verdict (test failure) but does not always disambiguate the underlying mechanism. Voidly's evidence database carries a blocking_method column that we populate from upstream packet-level evidence when available; for this AI-domain subset, the column is empty for 100% of rows.

What this means: for AI domains specifically, the OONI aggregation we ingest collapses the per-method detail (DNS poisoning vs TCP-RESET vs HTTP blockpage) into a single "anomalous" verdict. Reconstructing the methods requires going back to the raw OONI measurement files, which we do for high-priority incidents but not for the bulk-aggregated feed used here. The China hard block is widely reported elsewhere as DNS poisoning combined with SNI filtering on the GFW; we have not independently verified that for this measurement window. We are treating "method-unattributed" as a known limitation and flagging it explicitly rather than guessing.

Finding 5 — Measurement window

All evidence in this report was observed between 2026-04-12 and 2026-04-25 — a 13-day window. We do not yet have a longitudinal AI-domain dataset of sufficient depth to publish a "newly blocked this quarter" or "trend over the last 90 days" finding with confidence. The evidence database has been collecting AI-service measurements continuously since February 2026, but coverage of small-country probes was uneven before April. We flag this as a limitation and intend to publish the quarterly trend in the July 2026 report once a comparable Q2 window is available.

For real-time monitoring of these services in the meantime, see Voidly's live AI Censorship Index, which updates every five minutes.

Finding 6 — AI access during election windows

Two countries with restricted AI access in this measurement window also have upcoming elections or ongoing political tensions on Voidly's election-risk calendar: Pakistan (highest ChatGPT interference rate in the dataset, 28%) and Russia (uniform interference across all five services). We do not assert a causal link in this report — the measurement window is short, and we have no pre-election baseline to compare against — but the presence of AI services on the same network paths as restricted news, social, and messaging domains means an outage triggered for political reasons is likely to take AI access with it. We will publish a controlled before/after analysis in subsequent reports as more election-coincident data accumulates.

Voidly's election risk briefings API gives 7-day forecasts that combine ML-derived risk with the election calendar.

Finding 7 — Coverage gap on emerging providers

We attempted to measure nine additional AI services beyond the big three vendors: Perplexity (perplexity.ai), GitHub Copilot (copilot.github.com), Mistral (chat.mistral.ai), DeepSeek (chat.deepseek.com), Grok (grok.x.ai), Meta AI (meta.ai), Hugging Face (huggingface.co), Cursor (cursor.com), Replicate (replicate.com), and Cohere (cohere.ai). OONI's measurement footprint for these domains is currently insufficient — fewer than 10 events per domain across all countries in the 13-day window — so we cannot make accessibility claims about them with the same confidence as the big three. This is a real gap. The censorship measurement community has historically focused on social, news, and messaging services; AI-specific monitoring is in its first generation. Voidly is funding additional probes for these domains via our community probe program; if you want to contribute, see /probes.

Implications

Open data + reproduce

curl 'https://api.voidly.ai/v1/accessibility/check?domain=claude.ai&country=CN'
curl 'https://api.voidly.ai/v1/accessibility/check?domain=chatgpt.com&country=CN'
curl 'https://api.voidly.ai/v1/accessibility/check?domain=gemini.google.com&country=RU'

SELECT domain, country_code, signal_type, signal_value, COUNT(*) AS samples
FROM evidence
WHERE domain IN (
  'chatgpt.com', 'chat.openai.com', 'openai.com',
  'claude.ai', 'gemini.google.com'
)
  AND signal_type IN ('block', 'interference')
  AND observed_at >= '2026-04-12T00:00:00Z'
GROUP BY 1, 2, 3, 4
ORDER BY 1, 2;

About Voidly

Voidly is a censorship measurement and intelligence platform. We aggregate public network-measurement data (OONI, CensoredPlanet, IODA) with our own global probe network into a queryable evidence database covering 168 countries and 5,300+ documented censorship incidents. Our data and APIs are free for researchers, journalists, and academics under CC BY 4.0. We also build privacy tools — an E2E-encrypted messenger, an open agent payment ledger, and a VPN — that operate inside the same network conditions our research describes. The tools and the research share infrastructure so we can document our own products' reachability with the same instrumentation we apply to OpenAI's.