> To access their best models via the API, OpenAI now requires you to complete a Know-You-Customer process similar to opening a bank account.

This is not entirely true. It was entirely true for o3, but for GPT-5 it is only true for streaming and for reasoning summaries. I use GPT-5 with reasoning through the API without verifying my identity, I just don’t get the summary of the reasoning step. I don’t miss it, either. I never read them anymore now that the surprise has worn off.

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graham_king_3 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm the author of the post. Thanks for highlighting this. It's very confusing.

I cannot use it directly in OpenAI's API, even today:

> $ llm -m gpt-5-mini Hello

> Error: Error code: 400 - {'error': {'message': 'Your organization must be verified to stream this model. Please go to: https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/general and click on Verify Organization. If you just verified, it can take up to 15 minutes for access to propagate.', 'type': 'invalid_request_error', 'param': 'stream', 'code': 'unsupported_value'}}

Until two days ago, OpenAI on OpenRouter was Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK), so it didn't work there either.

Since they dropped BYOK, I can indeed use it through OpenRouter:

> $ llm -m openrouter/openai/gpt-5-mini Hello

> Hi — hello! How can I help you today?

This is for both `gpt-5` and `gpt-5-mini`. The `-nano` has always worked. I'm going to try some of my evals on gpt-5-mini, but it doesn't feel like I can depend on it.

	▲	dcre 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The key is “stream” in the error message. If you turn off streaming in llm (looks like --no-stream will do it) then I think it should work. I don’t understand why they gate streaming specifically but that’s what they seem to be doing.