Restricted territories

LowRouter is operated by an EU company and routes to providers that set their own geographic rules. Two kinds of restriction follow from that:

Sanctioned territories, where the service isn’t available at all.
Provider exclusions, where one provider’s terms rule out end users in a territory. Requests from there are never routed to that provider, and other providers still serve the request.

Both apply to the end user of a request, which is not always the account holder. If you build on LowRouter, your terms with your own users have to carry the same restrictions. Using a VPN or proxy to get around them breaches the terms of service.

Sanctioned territories

These are blocked on every model, under comprehensive EU and UN sanctions and EU Regulations 833/2014 (Russia) and 765/2006 (Belarus):

Territory	Code
Cuba	`CU`
Iran	`IR`
North Korea	`KP`
Syria	`SY`
Russia	`RU`
Belarus	`BY`
Crimea	`UA-43`
Sevastopol	`UA-40`
Donetsk region	`UA-14`
Luhansk region	`UA-09`

A request from one of these territories gets a 451 on every endpoint. An account cannot be created there, and a billing country on this list cannot buy credits.

Provider exclusions

Each row below is a provider’s own rule. A request from a listed territory is not routed to that provider:

With an auto/ id, the other providers of the model still compete for it.
With a full {provider}/… id pinned to the restricted provider, the request gets a 451.
When no route is left, the request gets a 451 too.

Provider	Applies to	Excluded end-user locations	Source
`anthropic`	every model	Anywhere not on Anthropic’s supported list, including China (with Hong Kong and Macau), Venezuela, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen and Kosovo. Ukraine’s Kherson (`UA-65`) and Zaporizhzhia (`UA-23`) regions are excluded too.	Supported regions
`vertex`, `aws-bedrock`, `deepinfra`	Claude models	Same as `anthropic`	Supported regions
`openai`	every model	Anywhere not on OpenAI’s supported list, including China (with Hong Kong and Macau) and Venezuela	Supported countries
`aws-bedrock`	OpenAI models	Same as `openai`	Supported countries
`aws-bedrock`	Cohere models	China, Hong Kong, Macau	Cohere EULA, “Restricted Location”
`google`	every model	Anywhere not on Google’s Gemini API list, including China (with Hong Kong and Macau), Myanmar and Afghanistan	Available regions
`deepinfra`	Gemini models	Same as `google`	Available regions
`meta`	every model	China (with Hong Kong and Macau), Afghanistan, Cambodia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Somalia, Venezuela, Western Sahara	Geographic use policy
`meta`	Muse Image	India, in addition to the row above	Geographic use policy
`tensorx`	every model	Myanmar, plus the FATF “call for action” jurisdictions that the sanctioned list above already covers	TensorX terms §17

Every other provider requires sanctions compliance only, which the first table covers.

Providers change these lists without notice. We re-check them before every release and update this page with them. The page’s date shows the last review.

How we locate a request

We read the location of each request from its IP address, using DB-IP’s IP to City Lite database (CC BY 4.0), refreshed monthly. Subdivision codes such as UA-43 come from the same database.

An address the database can’t place, such as a private range or an unmapped block, restricts nothing. For accounts, we also use the billing country Stripe verifies at checkout. The IP address itself is used only for this check, and logs record the territory, not the address.

What the API returns

A request from a sanctioned territory:

JSON

{
  "error": {
    "type": "permission_error",
    "message": "LowRouter is not available in your region (IR). See https://lowrouter.ai/docs/guides/restricted-territories/",
    "code": "unavailable_for_legal_reasons"
  }
}

A model whose remaining routes all exclude the caller’s territory:

JSON

{
  "error": {
    "type": "permission_error",
    "message": "auto/meta/muse-spark-1.3 is not available in your region (CN): provider terms exclude that territory — see https://lowrouter.ai/docs/guides/restricted-territories/",
    "code": "unavailable_for_legal_reasons",
    "param": "model"
  }
}

Retrying won’t help. The errors reference covers both responses.