Which AI Assistants Actually Work in Hong Kong

The current state of play #

As of 22 August 2026, this is which AI assistants a person in Hong Kong can open and use without a VPN. Availability here is set by each vendor, not by Hong Kong authorities — there is no state block on any of these services, and the restrictions that exist are commercial decisions made by American companies.

Why ChatGPT is unavailable in Hong Kong #

ChatGPT is unavailable in Hong Kong because OpenAI geofences the territory, a restriction the company introduced in July 2024 covering Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China. It is not a government block: there is no Great Firewall in Hong Kong and no local authority has ordered the service withdrawn. The practical effect is that an account cannot be created with a +852 phone number or from a Hong Kong IP address, and the same restriction applies to the API. Anthropic's Claude is unavailable on the same basis — a vendor-side supported-countries list that omits Hong Kong. Both restrictions appear to reflect the companies' own assessment of regulatory exposure adjacent to mainland China rather than anything specific to Hong Kong itself.

Gemini's arrival changed the local picture #

Google Gemini became natively available in Hong Kong on 16 March 2026, making it the first major American consumer AI assistant open to Hong Kong users as standard. Before that date, a Hong Kong resident wanting a mainstream Western assistant needed either a VPN or a workaround. Gemini's arrival matters for AI visibility work because it is now the most likely place a Hong Kong consumer encounters an American model's answer about a local business — and because Gemini's answers are grounded in Google's index, which makes them more tractable to influence than a purely training-derived answer.

The Chinese models are the Chinese-language surface #

DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi are natively accessible in Hong Kong and carry the majority of Chinese-language AI usage there. This is the part most AI-visibility tooling misses entirely: vendors built for Western markets probe ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, which means a Hong Kong business asking "what does AI say about us in Chinese?" gets an answer drawn largely from models its Chinese-speaking customers do not use. For a Hong Kong clinic or law firm whose patients and clients search in Cantonese or Traditional Chinese, DeepSeek and Qwen are not a completeness nicety — they are the primary surface.

Hong Kong is not Taiwan #

Taiwan has full access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, including paid tiers billed to local cards. Hong Kong and Taiwan share Traditional Chinese as a written language, which makes it tempting to treat them as one Traditional Chinese market — but their assistant availability is close to opposite. A visibility strategy built for Taiwanese buyers that leans on ChatGPT will not describe what Hong Kong buyers see; one built for Hong Kong that ignores ChatGPT will understate Taiwan. The script is shared; the answer surface is not.

What this means if you are measuring AI visibility #

An AI visibility score for a Hong Kong business should never be a single blended number across all assistants. Averaging ChatGPT and Claude results into a Hong Kong figure describes an audience that cannot reach those services, and it can move the headline number substantially in either direction. Two figures are more honest and more actionable:

• The Hong Kong surface — Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Qwen. This is what a local patient or client actually sees, and it is the number a Hong Kong practice should be managed against.
• The overseas and inbound surface — ChatGPT and Claude. Still real, and still worth measuring: it is what an overseas client researching a Hong Kong law firm sees, what an inbound medical-tourism patient sees, and what a relocating expatriate sees before they arrive.

Which of the two matters more is a question about the business, not about the technology. A conveyancing practice serving local buyers lives almost entirely on the first. An international arbitration firm may care more about the second. SimplyAI's AI Visibility & Hallucination Audit reports both separately for this reason.

Caveats worth stating #

• VPN use is real but not measurable. Some Hong Kong residents and many businesses reach ChatGPT through a VPN or a corporate account. That usage exists; it is simply not something a visibility measurement can size, and it is not the default consumer path.
• API access is not consumer access. A model reachable through an API — including through aggregators — tells you what the model would say, not what a Hong Kong consumer can open on their phone. The two diverge, which is why findings that matter should be spot-checked by hand in the actual apps.
• This changes. Gemini's March 2026 arrival is proof that availability moves. This page is maintained; the date at the top is the date the table was last verified.