Comment by JimDabell

OpenAI has notoriously terrible engineering. Look no further than the numerous Reddit threads and YouTube videos about people trying to give them money for their services and being denied. Users routinely have to try a number of credit cards, a number of web browsers, a number of devices, and a number of physical locations.

I’m not talking about sketchy prepaid cards from weird banks on a VPN in a country the United States doesn’t do business with. I’m talking about Americans getting their Chase cards rejected on their home wifi in Ithaca.

When this initially happened to me, I assumed it was a one off thing, but I was shocked to have found out that it’s been going on for at least six months, probably longer.

I didn't know this. Looks like I dodged a bullet - being totally blind meant the chance of issues was high but luckily it worked. It triggered the id check while trying to get computer use to work for an installer running as admin on windows. Actual reverse engineering I got it to do in the past didn't trigger it.

Looks like they don't want unlucky people on their platform.

GLM-5.2 has been very good

The cost on Deepseek is so low, it's no wonder it's the top on open router. You can even use it from other vendors like cloudflare.

Anthropic does not allow... "Digital or mobile IDs."

Why on earth not?

If you haven’t talked to Anthropic support yet you’re in for a surprise. I’m an engineer at a company with an enterprise contract, Anthropic people in our slack and it took me a month to get a response on my support request, I just decided it wasn’t worth it and bought a second phone number rather than wait.

Claude couldn't vibe code that loop.

You risk being silenly flagged and get nerfed responses. Somehting like shadow dumbed down.

The whole point of an identity check is that they know exactly who you are. If you tell them who you are and you fail the identity check, you can’t simply create a new account because when you go through the identity check for a second time you’ll still need to tell them exactly who you are, at which point they can match the new account to the original failure.

It's frustrating that I can't find docs that even pretend to answer this question. Maybe it's my fault, maybe I overlooked it? I hope so.

To me, without documented use cases where you might/likely/certainly trigger identity verification, how can I properly limit my curiosity as someone who will gladly stay on the safe side for SOTA cloud model use? I'll happily stay away from these topics if I'm informed on what they are, even if the docs are vague.

Does anyone have insight into the answer to this? What API calls? What user behavior? What topics should I let go unanswered (or converse about with local LLMs) if I want to avoid losing access to the tooling?

The thought that they don't/won't publish this document should scare everyone. That leads to "because I said so" service refusal that is a very slippery slope.

I do understand that all businesses are allowed to refuse service to me in the USA, from food trucks to AWS, and that's fine with me. But at least tell me your rules and extra verification trigger criteria so I have a chance of not using your service in a way that concerns you.

They require verification to access the more capable models through their API. It's not required for "consumer" usage, which also includes things like the Codex CLI authenticated via oAuth.

Control over... my government ID? I understand why someone might oppose this on systemic grounds if they don't believe that frontier models have dangerous capabilities, but I don't understand what the personal risk to me of ID verification is supposed to be. Unlike Discord, Anthropic has my credit card info, so they already know who I am.