The symptom: the page opens, the video surface never becomes real

In 2026, interest in text-to-video and generative video products is still loud—and so are the support threads. A pattern repeats: the top navigation renders, you can sign in, maybe you even see a grid of past jobs, but anything that depends on motion—preview loops, timeline scrubbing, or a freshly requested render—stalls with endless spinners or a player that never leaves the poster frame. Your tunnel indicator insists you are connected. A generic speed test looks fine. Swapping nodes sometimes helps for one session and then fails again, which is a clue that you are not dealing with a single slow hop but with multipart routing.

Video-forward AI products are not morally different from other HTTPS apps, yet their network shape is heavier than a chat box. The HTML shell might load from a primary corporate domain while adaptive bitrate segments arrive from a global cache, poster images from an image optimizer, and feature flags from yet another hostname. Clash evaluates each TCP connect independently. If your profile sends “most international HTTPS” to a sensible default but lets certain CDN prefixes fall into a domestic shortcut because of how their anycast addresses classify in GEOIP databases, you have built a product that looks online while the player starves.

This article is intentionally narrower than a catch-all “AI sites” tutorial. Our split routing guide for ChatGPT-class chat properties focuses on conversational stacks, WebSockets, and assistant APIs. Here we emphasize OpenAI video workloads, peer services with similar CDN fan-out, and the discipline of isolating CDN legs from generic chat rules so you can tune exits without collateral damage.

Why you should not fold Sora into the same policy group as “AI chat”

It is tempting to maintain one AI selector that covers every generative product you use. Operationally, that works until latency profiles diverge. Chat interfaces care about small JSON payloads, long-lived streams, and occasional file uploads. Video surfaces add large sequential downloads, bursty segment fetches, and aggressive browser caching behavior. The node that keeps a token stream smooth may be the wrong choice for pulling hundreds of short MP4 or fMP4 fragments through a congested path, and vice versa.

Separating groups also shrinks your debugging surface. When OpenAI rotates an API hostname or adds a new edge partner, you update a focused rule stanza—say, bindings that target Clash split routing for AI-VIDEO—without wondering whether your last tweak broke an unrelated assistant workflow. The mental model matches how teams operate internally: auth, control plane, and media delivery are different services even if the brand is the same.

If you already split streaming catalogs for entertainment video, the analogy is close. Our Netflix region split walkthrough explains keeping DRM-sensitive hostnames on one exit; AI video is not DRM-identical, but it punishes the same mistake—treating the visible domain as if it were the only domain.

Three layers to pin: app chrome, APIs, and CDN media

Think in three buckets when you inventory hostnames:

• Application and account chrome—pages, OAuth redirects, settings, and internal navigation. These often live on well-known corporate suffixes. For OpenAI’s ecosystem, traffic frequently clusters under patterns like openai.com and chatgpt.com, with product-specific subdomains as rollouts evolve. Your goal is a DOMAIN-SUFFIX rule that tracks the organization, not a brittle list of every marketing microsite.
• Control and inference APIs—REST or event streams that create jobs, poll status, or return metadata. Hostnames may include api.openai.com or additional service-specific API hosts when a product graduates from preview to general availability. If the web UI “works” but generation never completes, this bucket is the first place to confirm in your connection log.
• CDN and edge caches—segments, thumbnails, static JS, and WASM binaries served through large providers. You will often see third-party CDN domains or provider-owned edges that do not share the same suffix as the marketing site. Some responses ride Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront, or multi-CDN setups depending on region and experiment flags. Treat “looks like a CDN” hostnames as first-class citizens in the AI video group when your captures show they carry player-critical bytes.

Community GEOSITE bundles sometimes include an OpenAI category. Those lists are convenient, but they age at the speed of vendor infrastructure. Prefer them as a baseline, then layer manual DOMAIN-SUFFIX entries for hostnames your own client actually hits—especially CDN names that never appear in marketing copy.

Designing proxy groups: AI-VIDEO vs AI-CHAT

A practical profile shape keeps parallel selectors:

• AI-CHAT—nodes tuned for conversational latency and small payload reliability, wired to the rules from the AI chat split article.
• AI-VIDEO—nodes you are willing to use when large downloads and burst throughput matter. You might even reuse the same physical proxies but separate the groups so you can change the video selection without touching chat during an incident.
• AUTO—general international browsing, and DIRECT—for LAN and onshore services you never want to hairpin.

url-test groups can work for video if your health check URL reflects realistic HTTPS behavior, but avoid hyper-aggressive failover that flips exits mid-playlist; players interpret that as corruption or abandonment. When debugging, pin a single manual node under AI-VIDEO, reproduce once, then return to automated selection.

Rules: order is the product feature

Place explicit domain rules that reference AI-VIDEO above broad GEOIP,CN,DIRECT (or equivalent) shortcuts. The failure mode we are preventing is subtle: a CDN resolves to an address that your geo database labels as domestic, so Clash never consults the international default you assumed would catch “everything important.” Domain-based rules fire before that mistake when ordered correctly.

When you import remote RULE-SET files, treat them like dependencies: verify download success, watch for renames in upstream YAML, and keep custom additions in a short, commented block you own. The YAML routing primer remains the fastest way to rebuild mental clarity if you inherit a profile you did not author.

Illustrative snippets belong in notes beside your config, not as copy-paste gospel—vendor hostnames change. The invariant is structural: named group, narrow rules, precedence above GEOIP, and documentation of exceptions you add during a late-night incident so you do not merge them away next week.

DNS, Fake-IP, and why the player still lies

Video players are unforgiving of split-brain DNS. If the browser resolves a segment hostname through a path that does not match the TCP route Clash applies, you can see stalls that resemble codec errors. In Fake-IP setups, domain information usually survives long enough for suffix rules to match—until an entry in fake-ip-filter accidentally exempts a critical name or a parallel resolver bypasses the client.

Policy-based DNS (nameserver-policy in mihomo-class cores) can fix stubborn cases but introduces another knob. While isolating an issue, collapse to one trusted upstream, confirm end-to-end playback on AI-VIDEO, then reintroduce complexity with comments that justify each exception. The documentation hub collects diagrams for DNS modes if you need a refresher mid-debug.

HTTP/3 and QUIC add spice: if TCP-tunneled traffic and QUIC flows disagree about exits, symptoms mimic CDN “randomness.” When you see that pattern, align UDP handling with your rules or temporarily constrain the stack while you capture evidence—not guesswork.

Discovering the hostnames your browser actually uses

Because OpenAI video products evolve, the authoritative list is always the one your machine generates under load. Use your client’s live connection view (Clash Verge Rev and similar GUIs expose this) while you open a project, scrub a timeline, and request a new render. Export or screenshot the hostnames that spike during those actions. For each unfamiliar CDN domain, ask whether it should inherit AI-VIDEO or truly remain direct—domestic object storage mirrors, for example, might deserve a different policy.

Browser developer tools complement Clash logs: the Network panel shows which hostnames return 206 partial content, which serve manifests, and which block on authorization. Cross-check that the same hostnames appear in Clash with the policy you expect. If the UI says DIRECT while you intended AI-VIDEO, scroll upward in the rule list until you find the line that won—precedence bugs hide there.

Choosing exits for CDN-heavy workloads

Some providers score datacenter IP ranges differently from residential eyeballs. You are not obligated to debate their fraud models; treat each node label as a hypothesis. A relay that works for chat might throttle large edge downloads, or the reverse. Keep a short list of candidate exits per region and validate with reproducible player tests rather than one-off speed tests that never touch the same caches.

IPv6 deserves explicit attention. If your OS prefers IPv6 while your tunnel path is IPv4-clean (or the opposite), players may fetch init segments on one family and stall when the next request wanders. Align dual-stack behavior or temporarily disable the stray family while you isolate.

API and SDK traffic: not the same file as the web preview

Developers invoking OpenAI video APIs from servers or local scripts face the cousin of the browser problem: processes that do not inherit GUI proxy settings. If you automate renders, ensure the runtime sees HTTP_PROXY / HTTPS_PROXY or sits behind TUN, and pin API host rules to the same logical group you use for the product surface unless you have a reason to split control-plane from data-plane. Our CLI split routing article for Claude Code walks through the environment-variable story; the mechanics transfer to any non-browser OpenAI client.

Verification checklist before you blame the provider

Work through this sequence once; it saves hours of node roulette:

1. Confirm rule hits—reproduce the spinner while watching which policy Clash assigns to each new connect for player-related hostnames.
2. Freeze the exit—manually select a single node under AI-VIDEO and retry; if behavior stabilizes, your previous selector or health check was the chaos source.
3. Diff DNS paths—temporarily simplify DNS, retry, then restore.
4. Compare chat vs video groups—move a suspect CDN rule between AI-CHAT and AI-VIDEO deliberately to learn which profile matches real traffic.

Symptom map

Responsibility

Proxy software is a neutral tool. Provider terms, export controls, and local law still apply. This guide explains routing so your configuration behaves predictably when you are legitimately entitled to use a service. It is not an endorsement of evading authentication, misrepresenting residency, or bypassing restrictions a vendor or regulator imposes.

Closing: treat AI video as its own Clash story

Sora-class products will keep shifting hostnames and CDN partners, but your profile need not be fragile. Give OpenAI video and its peers a dedicated Clash split routing lane, pin CDN and API names with DOMAIN-SUFFIX / curated GEOSITE rules ahead of geography shortcuts, and validate with logs instead of superstition. Compared with opaque clients, Clash-family cores let you see exactly which rule matched when the next rollout lands.

When you want a maintained desktop build with a readable connection table and updater discipline, start from our download page so GUI and core stay aligned. Understanding YAML still matters, but packaging should not block you from testing an AI-VIDEO group. → Download Clash for free and experience the difference.