This is mostly rolled out to new users in the United States, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, Japan, India, Pakistan, Algeria, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. No other regions are planned.
A phone number can only ever be used for phone verification up to 3 times.
This means if you have 3 OpenAI accounts you can use the same number for all three when completing phone verification on each initial API key generation across those three accounts.
With some exceptions, we do allow consumers who have deleted their ChatGPT account to re-register using the same phone number. If you have permanently deleted your ChatGPT consumer account (and your account was not disabled for a violation of our terms or policies), we will remove the phone number from our system after 30 days. Once that happens, you may sign up again with the same number.
Unfortunately, we do not provide any exceptions to this rule. We recommend trying to use another phone number or accessing a previous account associated with your phone number.