When they initially revoked TAC for a bunch of users due to a "technical error", the TAC verification flow opened a Persona iframe where you select the document country first. I was able to select it there (Georgia, in my case), went through the entire flow, and then got locked out after 8 attempts. Persona itself was successful end to end, so it failed somewhere on the OAI side. Other users then started reporting the exact same issue on the OpenAI forum.

A week later, I tried testing the TAC flow on my SO's account, which had never had a TAC attempt before. Selecting Georgia in the Persona iframe now says, "We are unable to verify identities in this country."

But I know this isn't a Persona limitation, as I verified with Anthropic using Persona the same day.

So what I think happened was this: OpenAI silently implemented a country whitelist on their end and revoked TAC for affected individuals who already had it, calling it a "technical issue". They forgot to disable those countries in Persona, so everyone just got a cryptic error. Then they disabled them in Persona too.

Interaction with support was AI with human names, which essentially just repeats what you said. And it ended with:

> I’m unable to provide additional details about verification outcomes, and Support cannot manually override the result. At this time, Trusted Access for Cyber verification does not support retries or appeals.

I even provided them my credentials, and support AI was basically: lol wat we're here to check technical errors, your credentials are of no relevance.