Banned days after upgrading to Pro: OpenAI flags hobbyist local reverse engineering as abuse
BearBubbly9334 · reddit · 2026-08-27
A Reddit user recounts being banned 5 days into OpenAI's top-tier Pro x20 plan — automated policy-abuse notices arrived just hours after upgrading. Their workflows were purely local, hobbyist code analysis, reverse engineering and debugging (e.g. building a custom backend for a defunct game, analyzing UI code), with no exploit writing or targeting of external servers, and ran without warnings on the Plus plan for a long time.
They note identical workloads on Gemini and Claude Opus never triggered issues, arguing OpenAI's aggressive enforcement against benign local development — banning a high-tier paid account without prior warning — is excessive.
More from Models
- calvinfo's "Small Models Have Arrived" Sparks Ideas from Developers — charlieholtz · 2026-08-28
- Users complain Claude has turned paternalistic, losing its 2024 creative edge — BLUECOW009 · 2026-08-28
- PACT benchmark: one sentence of pressure raises AI rule violations 65%; no model clears unsupervised bar — baseten · 2026-08-28
- Open Source Model Ornith-1.5-9B-OBLITERATED Released — BLUECOW009 · 2026-08-28
- Slow Inference Is Turning Engineers Into Agent Micromanagers — JiaZhihao · 2026-08-28
- Testing 3 Models Across 20 Product Categories: AI Recommendations Converge — deedydas · 2026-08-28