ChatGPT in Uzbekistan: price, payment, and how Claude overtook it on tax

Is ChatGPT available in Uzbekistan?

Yes, ChatGPT is officially available in Uzbekistan. The country is on OpenAI’s list of supported countries for ChatGPT on the web and on mobile. OpenAI opened sign-ups to users in Uzbekistan in November 2023, as Spot reported on 9 November (in Russian). You do not need a VPN, someone else’s account or a sign-up “via another country”. If anything, OpenAI warns on the same page that using the service from a country that is not on the list may get your account blocked or suspended.

The same goes for the competitors. Uzbekistan is on both of Anthropic’s lists, for Claude.ai and for the commercial API. Google’s Gemini is available in Uzbekistan, and Uzbek is among its supported languages. The paid Google AI Pro subscription is sold here too.

To sign up for ChatGPT, go to chatgpt.com and continue with Google, Apple, a phone number or an email address. You can also try it without an account: the login page has a “Try it first” button.

ChatGPT price in Uzbekistan: Go, Plus, Pro and Business

The prices below were taken on 28 September 2026 from the pricing pages as they appear to a visitor in Uzbekistan. These pages can show different prices in different countries, which is why we checked from here. Som amounts use the Central Bank rate for that day: 11,825.40 som to the dollar (cbu.uz).

Sources: ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI.

ChatGPT Go at $5 launched in Uzbekistan in October 2025 (Spot, in Russian). Go, Plus and Pro are billed monthly only: OpenAI does not offer annual billing for them. The annual discount is available on ChatGPT Business, Claude Pro and Claude Team.

All three companies change their plans, and Anthropic and OpenAI both say outright that prices may change. Check the pricing page before you buy, and read the table as a snapshot taken on 28 September 2026.

Where a 12% VAT can come from

Uzbekistan’s Tax Code has a separate chapter, Chapter 39, on foreign companies that provide services electronically. Under Article 278 (in Russian), a foreign company selling such services to individuals in Uzbekistan is itself a VAT payer. A ChatGPT subscription falls under item 1 of Article 282, which covers granting the right to use software over the internet, including through remote access. The VAT rate is 12% (Article 258).

The mechanics: the company must register with the tax authority within 30 days of starting sales. Tax is calculated quarterly, based on when payment is received, and foreign-currency amounts are converted into som at the Central Bank rate on the last day of the month in which payment arrived. The return and the payment are due by the 20th of the month after the quarter (Articles 279–281). OpenAI registered as a VAT payer in Uzbekistan in April 2025 (Gazeta.uz, in Russian), and Anthropic on 2 February 2026 (Spot, in Russian).

What this means for the buyer. Anthropic states on its pricing page: “Prices shown don’t include applicable tax”. Anthropic pays VAT in Uzbekistan (figures below), so 12% will most likely be added at checkout. That would make Claude Pro $22.40, about 265,000 som. ChatGPT’s pricing page says nothing about tax. Whether VAT is added on top only shows at checkout, and we did not go that far on either ChatGPT or Claude.

Companies are treated differently. Under part four of Article 278, when an Uzbek legal entity buys such a service, the buyer becomes the tax agent: your company has to calculate and pay the VAT itself. If you are putting ChatGPT Business or Claude Team on the company, show that article to your accountant before the first payment.

How to pay for ChatGPT from Uzbekistan

The options OpenAI itself describes:

1. A bank card on the website. The multi-currency billing article says credit and debit cards are accepted in all countries. The som is not among the local billing currencies, so you will be charged in US dollars. You need a card that works for online payments abroad. Whether a particular bank’s cards go through is a question for that bank: neither OpenAI nor we have a list.
2. Subscribing in the app. If you subscribe in the ChatGPT app on iPhone or Android, the subscription is managed by the App Store or Google Play rather than by OpenAI, as the same help article says. You pay with whatever payment method is linked to that app store.
3. The business plan. ChatGPT Business is paid by card. Enterprise can be invoiced, which is arranged through OpenAI’s sales team (FAQ on the pricing page).

Claude Pro is paid by card, monthly or annually. Google’s plans are bought through your Google account.

What not to do: buy a ready-made “shared” account, or split one Plus subscription across a whole department. OpenAI’s Terms of Use forbid sharing your account credentials or making your account available to anyone else. For a team there is Business, covered below. We do not describe ways to pay through middlemen to get around the rules: Uzbekistan is a supported country, so there is nothing to get around.

Personal plan or business plan: what happens to your data

Plus at $20 and a Business seat at $20–25 differ in more than shared billing and an admin console. The difference is what happens to the conversations.

• Personal ChatGPT plans (Free, Go, Plus, Pro). In the comparison table on the pricing page, their row “Content is used to train our models” says “Opt-out available”. By default your chats may be used to train models, and you have to switch that off yourself in settings.
• ChatGPT Business, Enterprise and the API. Here OpenAI states: “We do not train our models on your data by default”.
• Claude works the same way. On Free, Pro and Max you opt out of training yourself; for Team the pricing page says “No model training on your content by default”.
• Gemini. In its privacy hub Google says some chats are read by human reviewers and asks you not to enter confidential information you would not want a reviewer to see.

For a business owner the conclusion is simple. If an employee pastes a price list, a contract or a customer conversation into their personal chat, that data lives under the rules of their personal account. Whether you may send customers’ personal data to a foreign model at all is a separate question. The rules changed on 27 March 2026; we covered them in our piece on ZRU-1125.

What tax data shows: Claude overtook ChatGPT

Uzbekistan’s Tax Committee regularly reports how much foreign providers of electronic services have paid. In 2025 there were 78 such companies; together they paid 181.3 billion som, 56% more than in 2024. OpenAI went straight to fourth place with 11.7 billion, behind Apple, Meta and Google, having not been on the list at all the year before (Gazeta.uz, 30 January 2026, in Russian).

In the first half of 2026 the number of companies rose to 97, and the tax they paid to 143.8 billion som, 84% more than in the same period of 2025. Anthropic paid 6.3 billion som, OpenAI 5.6 billion. It was the first time the maker of Claude came out ahead: after the first quarter Anthropic was sixth, right behind OpenAI, and it had not made the 2025 top ten at all (Gazeta.uz, 4 August 2026, in Russian). And Anthropic only registered in February 2026. OpenAI is growing too: in the first half of 2025 it paid 2.9 billion, almost half as much (Spot, in Russian).

Tenth place on the same list went to Anysphere, with 1.5 billion som. That is the company that makes the AI code editor Cursor. So for the half-year, three of the ten largest foreign taxpayers for electronic services are companies whose main product is AI.

How much Uzbekistan spends on ChatGPT and Claude: an estimate

Tax is not revenue, but it can give a rough estimate of revenue. First, a sanity check. For 2025 the committee published both the tax and the turnover of each company in the top ten. For eight of the ten, tax comes to between 11.6% and 12.1% of turnover, which is the VAT rate. For Amazon it is 10%. For OpenAI it is 20%: 11.7 billion in tax on a turnover of 57.7 billion. The report does not explain why. Dividing OpenAI’s tax by 12% gives a 2025 turnover of 97.5 billion som; the published figure is 57.7 billion. We do not have an exact number, only a range.

In 2026 the anomaly is gone. For the first quarter, revenue was published for each company: OpenAI paid 2.5 billion som in tax on 21.5 billion of revenue, Anthropic 1.5 billion on 12.6 billion, or 11.6% and 11.9% (Spot, 7 May 2026, in Russian). For the half-year the committee gave only the total turnover: more than 1.2 trillion som against 143.8 billion in tax. Again, about 12%. So we estimate each company’s half-year turnover as its tax divided by 0.12:

* At the Central Bank rate on 30 June 2026, 12,060.84 som to the dollar (cbu.uz). The rate moved during the half-year, so treat these as orders of magnitude, not exact sums.

For scale: $4.4 million over six months is roughly 36,000 subscriptions at $20 a month. But the total includes the API and plans cheaper and dearer than $20, so it does not tell you how many people are paying.

Real spending is probably higher than this estimate, for two reasons that both follow from Article 278.

1. The figures cover sales to individuals only. When an Uzbek company buys the service, it pays the VAT itself as tax agent. Those payments should not show up in OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s tax.
2. Subscriptions through app stores. When a middleman takes the payment from the buyer, that middleman becomes the tax agent. By that logic, ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions bought through the App Store or Google Play should count towards Apple’s and Google’s tax.

What this means for a business owner

The tax data does not say who is paying. But given how the law works, it is mostly individuals, people paying with their own cards. Some of them may be your employees. This is not a local quirk: according to the MIT NANDA 2025 report, workers at more than 90% of the companies surveyed regularly use personal AI tools for work (our breakdown).

Your staff already use AI. What remains is to decide which account it runs through and what may go into it. A short checklist:

1. Ask the team who uses what, and on which plan. Calmly and without penalties, or you will not get honest answers.
2. Write down what must not go into personal chats: customers’ personal data, contracts, CRM exports.
3. Do the maths. If two or more people use AI, compare a business plan with a pile of personal subscriptions. Billed annually, a seat on ChatGPT Business or Claude Team costs $20, the same as a personal Plus, and training on your data is off by default.
4. Show your accountant Article 278. When the company pays, the company calculates and pays the VAT.
5. Don’t expect a subscription to do what it doesn’t do. A subscription helps one person with their own tasks. If you want a model to answer customers or process documents from your CRM on its own, that is AI implementation in a process: the model is connected to your data and the result is checked against a metric.

Whether the government programme that reimburses 50% of AI costs will cover subscriptions is unknown: when we reviewed the programme on 23 September 2026 we found no reimbursement procedure, and we have no newer information on it (what is known about the programme).

What we don’t know

We did not go through checkout on ChatGPT or Claude, so we do not know whether OpenAI adds VAT to the price for Uzbekistan or includes it. That Anthropic will add exactly 12% is our inference from its note on tax, not a bill we have seen. Prices on the pricing pages can depend on the country and they change; everything here is as of 28 September 2026, from pages opened in Uzbekistan.

The tax figures come from Gazeta.uz and Spot, which cite the Tax Committee. We could not find the press release on the committee’s own website. Company turnover for the first half of 2026 is our estimate via the 12% rate, not published data. We do not know why OpenAI’s 2025 tax came to 20% of turnover. That payments by companies and subscriptions through the App Store and Google Play are not included in OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s tax is our reading of Article 278, not guidance from the tax authority.

Where we stand, honestly

We do not sell ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini subscriptions and do not help pay for them on your behalf. In our own products we connect models through APIs, not subscriptions. In Valli, our auto-responder for Telegram Business, for example, the owner can connect their own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google key. Customer replies then go through the owner’s account with the provider, and the owner pays the provider for the model directly. Valli is currently in pilot.

Client projects follow the same rule: the account with the model provider is in the client’s name, and the keys are theirs.

If you want to work out where AI already runs through personal accounts in your company, and which process to move onto a proper setup, describe it in the questionnaire on our home page. The breakdown of one process arrives within 48 hours, free and without a call.