Crypto cards are being used to bypass ChatGPT and Claude geo-restrictions, with weak KYC driving the market

Visa and Mastercard crypto cards are increasingly doing more than paying for coffee and subscriptions. According to an investigation cited by The Economist and published by Mint, they are also being used to route payments around geographic restrictions on US AI services, including ChatGPT and Claude. For PSPs, the useful part of this story is not the AI angle; it is the combination of card rails, stablecoins, and weak KYC.

1. Paymentscan data shows that transaction volume on these cards exceeded $1.1 billion in August 2026, which was three times higher than a year earlier. The number of identified crypto card providers also rose from about 100 in April to 250 in September, so this is not a niche corner case anymore.
2. Crystal Intelligence reported in April 2026 that nearly seven in ten crypto card providers had weak KYC (know your customer) requirements or none at all. That creates the obvious payment-risk problem: cards can be issued, funded, and used with very little identity friction, which is exactly the sort of setup sanctions teams and acquiring risk desks spend their days trying to avoid.
3. The Economist tested this through a Russian-language Telegram channel and obtained a Visa card from CinCin. The card was added to Apple Pay within minutes without documents, while the service advertised a monthly payment limit of up to $500,000. In practice, that is a big usable limit sitting on top of a very light onboarding flow.
4. The same report says crypto cards are being used in China to access OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, despite restrictions on those services. Chinese social networks reportedly circulate instructions for paying for these subscriptions through crypto cards and intermediary services.
5. One source told The Economist that a user used a card opened with a Chinese document and a foreign address to buy ChatGPT subscriptions worth $50,000. Researchers also found a Hong Kong crypto provider whose card-linked wallets received more than $355 million in US-dollar stablecoins from the end of 2024; observers said part of those funds may have been used to buy access to AI models.

Visa said it prohibits illegal activity on its network. Mastercard said essentially the same thing, which is standard network hygiene language. The payment takeaway is simpler: if your crypto card stack can be opened with minimal identity checks, it can become a general-purpose workaround for geo-blocks, not just a retail payment product.