ChatGPT starts paying VAT in Kazakhstan

The OpenAI company, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, has been officially registered as a VAT payer in Kazakhstan, according to the State Revenue Committee (SRC) of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

As the SRC noted, it is actively working to ensure transparency and fair taxation in the digital economy.

«From now on, ChatGPT will pay VAT for services provided to individuals in Kazakhstan following local tax legislation,» the agency said in a statement.

Since 2022, the country has been successfully implementing a tax on digital services, known as the «Google tax.» The Kazakh government believes this has become an important step toward the fair taxation of international IT companies providing services in the Kazakhstani market.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) system based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language model. It is trained on a vast array of texts and is capable of analyzing requests and questions, providing logical and meaningful answers, and helping with translation, writing, programming, training, and many other tasks. The AI serves as a virtual assistant, consultant, or tool for work and creativity.

According to the Ministry of Finance, as of February 2025, 101 foreign companies were registered in Kazakhstan, including giants such as Huawei, AliExpress, Google, Apple and Netflix. Over the past three years, these companies have transferred 75 billion tenge ($147.3 million) in taxes to the country’s budget, with 35 billion tenge ($68.7 million) received in the last year alone. At the end of 2024, TEMU, Pinduoduo and the Alibaba Group joined the list of companies officially registered in Kazakhstan.

In April 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that about 800 million people around the world — every tenth human being on the planet — use the ChatGPT neural network.