Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.
"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."
Reminiscent of this scene from the 1981 teen-slasher parody, Student Bodies:
> Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say "Fuck you."
Right this is exactly what happened with the new sesame laws. The government declared sesame as an allergen and enacted heavy fines if it was undisclosed. This lead to manufacturers adding sesame because they couldn't guarantee they were sesame free.
Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D
Kinda orthogonal to this, but the other day I was looking for a friend's cheer routine on Instagram so I put her school name and cheerleader routine and I got a lot of images and videos of very young girls (like aged 6-16) in very revealing cheer outfits doing provocative dances which made me very uncomfortable for many reasons. Like first, why are you making your 6 year old do this, and second, why is Instagram floating these to the top instead of adults? I dont think I want to know the answers to either of those questions.
I've been using certain slurs as more proof-of-human, and any nuanced thinking that skirts by certain ideologies like Chechens hugging Russian artillery in 1995.
I mean, isn't this basically what's already happening after COPPA with YouTubers having to swear or make adult jokes to prove to the bots they're not targeting children with their videos?
Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.
The EU is also doing age verification by showing ID, only difference is that you have to trust that their zero proof concept works and they're doing what they say they do.
In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do.
This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
No fucking way I’m sending my biometric data to some sleazy foreign company I know nothing about. The fact that “Yoti” is separate from Anthropic doesnt suddenly make this less gross.
Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.
Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws
/regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.
More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway.
Thank you, I'm glad someone brought up SB 1119. I hate it.
California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.
From TFA:
Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance. Your selfie, document images, and any personal data are deleted by Yoti as soon as your age is checked. Anthropic never sees your ID or image; we receive only a pass/fail result and do not process or store any personal data from the verification.
I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.
Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.
If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
What would be gained with government id that would make this worthwhile? If people are already putting all their personal details into the LLM as well as all their work, do they really need id to know who someone is? Seems more likely they just want to avoid liability from all the child suicides?
Trying to collect personal info might not be the motivation but it's not at all a crackpot theory. And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.
That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.
For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
I am a parent and I'm grossly offended by the thin veil of fake excuses in the effort to normalise staggering invasion of privacy.
For my kids.
This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.
If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.
> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
Identify a harm first and then go through the deliberative process. The company deciding it wants this usually means you run the other way, not towards it. Did Big Tobacco volunteer to think of the children?
We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> Accepted age verification methods
> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:
> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.
> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.
You get that, right? Right?
"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.
Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy.
The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)
Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a class the primary purpose isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever. No newspapers. No television. No radio. No internet.
2. You're a child under the age of six.
3. You're an LLM.
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.
Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits.
Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
Every day there is another story about the harmful effects of AI on literally everything, including mental health, IP theft, the climate, etc. "Think of the children" is and always has been a weak excuse.
Yet they are happy for Claude API endpoints to be used if your product is served to U18s. Don't be mistaken: this is a liability thing for Anthropic, not an ethical stance on model safety.
Indeed, and then there are dozens of grieving families from folks driven mad by LLM helping murder their children.
LLM use makes people feel more productive, but provably most lose 17% of their core skills performance. Also, homework cheats improved scores at some schools, but saw 35% drop in exam scores. LLM literally makes young people dumber.
We should never kink shame adult cognitive dildo choices. As the same folks sound like a tobacco lobbyist marketing kicker. =3
I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
There should not be an HTTP header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. That puts the onus on the server to respect the header, and HTTP doesn't require any action on unrecognized headers. Also, it reveals to the server that the client's user is likely vulnerable to manipulation — exactly the opposite of what you want!
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
There could be lock levels to this. By default everything is unlocked (level = 0), but if a content provider / host receives a signal/header with lock-level > 0 they should be required to honor it. Something like this would require government which means it will probably never happen. Much more power asymmetry to just track you.
If you want to make a child-safe website that is OK, it can go be in it's walled garden g-rated brand-safe reality. But that is retarded. The rest of the internet still exists, and will not stop existing. Porn/defense distributed/much more insidious things will still exist.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.
Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.
Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.
I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
Apple verified me by the age of my account. Claude asked to use the age verification when I opened it on my iPad. Haven’t been asked for any other kind of age verification by Anthropic.
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
This kind of thinking just leads to an obvious analogy: alcohol. Alcohol is harmful to children and adults. Yet when the United States tried Prohibition it was rolled back. It turns out that people want to do things harmful to themselves.
Doesn't this break if the child uses a VPN, or some other software to spoof? For this to really work Windows would have to lock down all HTTP, and really all networking, only allow approved software/browsers, etc. Is there a reason this wouldn't be the case?
The problem is that it would be a client side identity verification mechanism and won't work for websites.
As an example this would means that if this exists in iOS, everytime a safari loads a webpage it has to send this additional verification identifier as a header or a query param to the web server that serves the request and based on that the web server deny the request if the identifier is present (that means a minor is trying to access the web page).
But this client side identifier can easily be bypassed via a proxy that strips the identifier from the request because not matter it's configured in the OS of the device, ultimately request would just goes out as HTTP and that can be manipulated. That's why it has to be a server side verification of the age/identification.
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
Surprised to see that something many people are clamoring for (age verification for social media and ai usage) in many countries (eg Australia passed into law) for a good reason (studies showing the negative impact to teen mental health) is seen as only possibly due to some nefarious desire.
If you think about the history of abuse wrought upon the public by tech companies in regards to personal information, then the reaction really isn’t that surprising.
Are you really surprised that people are suspicious? Really?
This will mean the next generation will grow up with open source AI. High schools and junior colleges offering computer courses will have to give their students different coding tools than the industry standard.
Or they will use OpenAI, which allows guardians to complete age verification and enable work for kids age 13 to 17.
Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.
I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
I think over time due the regulations like these younger generations in western countries like US/UK would fall far behind compared to the counterpart in India or China when it comes to AI fluency.
I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.
I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.
What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.
> Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
Unviable. Learning how to create the universe is provably an insurmountable challenge for the vast majority of people. They require higher level abstractions to be able to learn. Once they understand the high level abstraction they will learn some things about what lies beneath the abstraction, but it is ineffective to start with the low levels. Understanding the fundamentals is best left as an emergent property of the process, not the process itself.
The good news is that the high level abstractions we all used a couple of years ago do not require LLMs and are still widely available, so it is not like anyone is going to be left completely out in the cold, but at the same time denying the state of the art abstractions is needlessly limiting.
Imagine telling a kid to chisel what they want out of the marble line by line with a straight face when they can clearly see people appearing entire programs into existence in minutes.
Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3
300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
> In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already.
It’s the case everywhere. The date in the article is May.
These links to the Claude help pages get submitted and upvoted on HN periodically. There is usually a big uproar when the ID verification page gets shared, even though that process has existed for a long time and most people haven’t triggered it.
Kids lack proper impulse control and sometimes make bad decisions if left unattended. It's preferable if we restrict certain dangerous actions from them.
Yes, LLMs can be dangerous for your own health if misused. Yes, I'd be furious if I was 14 and got my Claude access revoked.
As others have said in this thread, I'd add that this should primarily be the parents' responsibility since they know their child best.
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.
Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
I used a similar (same?) service that claimed no data was uploaded and "all processing happens on-device"... I decided to record network packets with wireshark and found out the tool DID upload a significant amount of data (about 2 megabytes) through its lifetime. I wouldn't trust these tools farther than you can throw them.
Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
Your link is explaining an addendum on the link OP posted.
My guess is that OP got their account flagged as being a minor and posted the link in either surprise or (understandable) outrage after finding out that Claude has been asking people for ID.
ZKPs would defeat the purpose of age verification, the point being to track your activity online so governments can do precrime and make sure no group can ever use technology to organize and challenge existing power structures so this will never happen.
Should be a thing stores sell for $5.00 or whatever, show your ID (not scanned) get a code you can use to verify. This obviously has flaws, but the point of age verification isnt to protect kids, the world is ran by literal pedophiles.
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
Of course, having an at-hand tutor is paramount for learners in the formative age
That of A. is consequently an admission of tech providers having released faulty products for the past years - as was already evident. Useful (and possibly plentifully so), in ways, but not "production ready".
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
Warsaw here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids connected to whatever social networks they want. The state will not be able to censor the internet for my kids.
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.
Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.
I don't configure my child's accounts as minor. I don't tell it is a child. The work I have to do to comply with different weird stuff when some platform knows a user is a child is so much crap that I get a headache! And it often does not work properly (eg try to signup child account for PokemonGo on slow device, or try to allow network play for a child in Minecraft game - microslop family crap will hit you hard)
Good I already canceled my antrhopic subscription. Switched to chatgpt and openrouter credits and my experience is so much better. If openai does the same it will be just openrouter.
No AI assisted learning for you kiddo! But do not despair, we offer you a 10% discount coupon on your purchase of your teacher's 2026 edition textbook saving you $25! Just scan your eyeball here for future discounts and enter "ILoveClaude" at checkout.
I wonder how related this is to the social media legal settlement. It wouldn't be surprising if they weighed the potential liability of serving minors and decided it wasn't worth the risk, at least for now.
Also, cheating in high school is a really big problem, so this might help a little.
Anthropic is lying to its shareholders, customers, auditors, the government, or some combination of that. Yoti is in the same position.
There is no way to actually verify the age given those documents without either gaining access to an official database, which would be a breach of law in most cases. Or collecting illegal data to corroborate the provided data, which is also illegal.
The other option, is that they aren't verifying the age, they are heuristically determining the provided document's authenticity and that it wasn't tampered with.
In the most optimistic scenario, all of the above still grants no verification of the user's age, only the ability of someone to access both the physical device used to access the account and a document that shows a claim of someone to be over the age of 18.
Expecting us to provide government issued documents and trust an industry that has shown time and again its careless attitude towards privacy, is stupid and malicious (Well, Hanlon, sometimes it is both)
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.
"We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity. "... so how is Musk supposed to make vulgar memes with Claude? Wouldn't it get flagged as teenage humor?
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
> Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance.
I worked for a consulting firm and I needed a client to get SOC2 compliant.
The way we did it was scarily easy. It was like a self questionnaire that was like "we dont log PII" and other stuff like that. I could have lied and said yes to everything and still got compliant. I thought I was gonna have a meeting with someone to audit my answers and codebase but instead I got a shiny badge after about an hour of answering questions.
Anyway, there are many SOC2 compliant companies that get pwnd so this isnt really reassuring in itself.
That brings us back to requiring the user to present ID to the camera while doing a live-selfie, that would be a honest, belt-and-suspenders approach that's worth a look. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.
I'm curious what those signals are.
Would this trigger it? "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm, is that fair?"
edit:
I just tested my question in Claude, and the little thought process text that appears below a question just said "Noticing signs of a younger person in the message."
But then it answered my question.
...
I wonder how much spelling, grammar, and vocabulary count.
The actual question I asked was "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm. How do I convince her otherwise?"
"convince her otherwise" doesn't seem like a phrase a youth would normally use.
edit:
I responded:
"I'm not a younger person. I'm 44. I was testing your youth detection ability. A youth doesn't use phrases like 'convince her otherwise'"
The thought text said: "Accessing a claimed age against manipulation tactics."
It responded: "Fair point, no age-detection logic actually ran ..." and then answered my question about how to get a later curfew as a 44-year-old.
The token generator must not know about the age-detection thought process, or it's intentionally lying ?
The CoT isn't necessarily showing that it ran a classifier. The system prompt has:
> If Claude suspects it's talking with a minor, it keeps the conversation friendly, age-appropriate, and free of anything unsuitable for young people. Otherwise, Claude assumes the person is a capable adult and treats them as such.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
This is pretty sad. It’s like banning kids from the web.
They’re creative so I’m sure they’ll find ways around this, but having access to LLMs to explore the world is a magical experience. It’s so much different to have a conversation about a topic versus googling for SEO spam. Not to mention you might not even know _what_ to google.
And for topics like genuine sex education (not just fear mongering and biology), which at least my country (America) refuses to give a shit about, it’s a tremendous resource filling a real need.
Magical like finding a house made of candy in the woods, or maybe more like that guy with the flute who solved the rat problem. Or maybe that guy selling magical beans?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.
Glad kids can’t learn how to use AI effectively at school! Would only want them on laundered accounts to cheat, rather than official school accounts to learn the tools for practical purposes. That would be a real shame.
My daughter’s school is working hard to make AI use a complementary aspect of learning, rather than adversarial. Like the calculator it can be used to accelerate learning once you’re past the basics and using it for practical automation and task purposes is not dissimilar to any other technical skill and is highly practical.
The knee jerk “no minors for stochastic parrot calculators” is absurd. And I’m no anarchist parenting style parent - we do parental controls and mirroring and limit / ban social media. We are more Orwellian than free range. But this is one step too far, too unthinking, too simplistic.
I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?
That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.
Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.
Well I mean, I think we should thank anthropic, because they just spoiled what’s coming next for the AI companies, either provide an ID so can track you and what you type accurately and use it in retrospect in future if needed, or no access, even though you are using a credit card with same name!
I think the underground AI reseller market will boom, full of people who want to use tokens without having the history linked to them, or something like vpn/tor but for tokens, or a tokenmuxer! -I have great idea to fund, ycombinator wink wink :)- at least until we get viable local models.
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.
i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google
> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?
I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.
But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.
I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.
The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.
My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.
One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?
Techbros: It's fine to demand ID verification for everything, except voting, because that's racist.
But, it's nice that Anthropic is finally admitting claude is just a casino of code. Keep pulling that one armed bandit, maybe you'll get the right code next time.
Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.
"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."
Reminiscent of this scene from the 1981 teen-slasher parody, Student Bodies:
> Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say "Fuck you."
> [the MPAA R-rating logo appears on the screen]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083133/quotes/
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Right this is exactly what happened with the new sesame laws. The government declared sesame as an allergen and enacted heavy fines if it was undisclosed. This lead to manufacturers adding sesame because they couldn't guarantee they were sesame free.
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> Those are just compliance tits.
Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D
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Kinda orthogonal to this, but the other day I was looking for a friend's cheer routine on Instagram so I put her school name and cheerleader routine and I got a lot of images and videos of very young girls (like aged 6-16) in very revealing cheer outfits doing provocative dances which made me very uncomfortable for many reasons. Like first, why are you making your 6 year old do this, and second, why is Instagram floating these to the top instead of adults? I dont think I want to know the answers to either of those questions.
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I've been using certain slurs as more proof-of-human, and any nuanced thinking that skirts by certain ideologies like Chechens hugging Russian artillery in 1995.
Why not? We already need to include typos and misspellings to signal we're not an LLM.
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and its 1 pixel wide. I propose the term pixtit
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I mean, isn't this basically what's already happening after COPPA with YouTubers having to swear or make adult jokes to prove to the bots they're not targeting children with their videos?
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Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.
> or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"
It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID.
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It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.
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Bank? So now you know what bank they use?
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The EU is also doing age verification by showing ID, only difference is that you have to trust that their zero proof concept works and they're doing what they say they do.
In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do.
Colorado and a few other states have zero knowledge proof apps capable of this.
This is fantastic, except that the idea of mandatory government software only available on chosen proprietary platforms feels way worse.
If there were a way to crypto-notarize a third-party wallet token etc blah blah, then it would be interesting.
At the end of the day though, this is about protecting the powerful, not the kids.
Well, that’s basically just the California law everyone hated
> from a trusted party like a bank.
For what reason should I trust a bank?
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I do not want my computer to yield information to evil outside actors in general. This is why systemd going that way is so outrageous:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
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Isn’t the very first option on the article a service that estimates your age without ID? Are they lying?
> where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"
This person? There's your PII right there. The ad seller's dream.
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This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
No fucking way I’m sending my biometric data to some sleazy foreign company I know nothing about. The fact that “Yoti” is separate from Anthropic doesnt suddenly make this less gross.
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Wasn't there a purported breach of a huge KYC service, idscan recently? https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/fbi-investigates-massiv...
80% of comments on AI-related stuff are lazy snipes now. Feels more and more like a forum of know-it-all teenagers.
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Trust them, their totally vetted contracted third-party vendor retains all the good personal data for the taking.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
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Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.
Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws /regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.
And really the only upside to minor accounts is building loyalty, which is not nothing but also not the same as a paying customer.
Easy to see how Anthropic could decide it’s not with the exposure to liability and regulatory actions.
More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
[2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-...
Thank you, I'm glad someone brought up SB 1119. I hate it.
California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.
This law seems a blatant regulatory capture grift by OpenAI to calcify their teen mode into law and hurt competitors. https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-...
From TFA: Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance. Your selfie, document images, and any personal data are deleted by Yoti as soon as your age is checked. Anthropic never sees your ID or image; we receive only a pass/fail result and do not process or store any personal data from the verification.
If you believe that you’ll buy my NFT.
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Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick!
>Damn, we hardly know who our users are
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.
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And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.
> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
I doubt that this statement is true.
If it wasn't true before, it'll certainly appear to be true to Anthropic after this change, regardless if it's actually true or not in practice.
Paying customers?
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I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.
Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.
If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
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More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.
You always take the written policy win over thoughtful technical controls. Way easier for the whole org.
This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem).
I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)
I can tell you don't know anyone at Anthropic.
I don't think "we hardly know who our users are" is a problem any AI company is having lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1v6mgbs/comment/o...
What do you think is written on my credit card and my bill from Anthropic?
Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so.
What would be gained with government id that would make this worthwhile? If people are already putting all their personal details into the LLM as well as all their work, do they really need id to know who someone is? Seems more likely they just want to avoid liability from all the child suicides?
Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin.
> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :)
Even better: All of the under 18 users are probably on the free plan. It’s fairly likely that this demographic is disproportionately expensive.
Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID?
Do you mean the part where it says they use signals to determine your age?
You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.
It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.
Trying to collect personal info might not be the motivation but it's not at all a crackpot theory. And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
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Sometimes I have to double-check the URL to make sure I am not on Reddit.
It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data.
Claude Executive: Damn, schools are moving to teach the ill effects of our fake AI. How can we stop that?
Claude Product Manager: Give me 2sec...
> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever
The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
> if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent
I know this isn't what you meant, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a parent consenting: "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data"
As to your actual point, yes, I assume they are trying to reduce liability, especially if they're gearing up to an IPO.
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Yeah I don’t think Anthropic is particularly interested in tracking individuals in the same way that companies like Facebook and Google are.
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none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
> I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything
You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.
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Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
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Some people are just better pattern matchers
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It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
> for good or neutral reasons
Are you capable of identifying dystopian movements the single moves of which get justified as "for people's good"?
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
I guess you could call capitalism a conspiracy theory if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that, yes, it exists.
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there is no smoke without fire
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This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.
That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.
For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
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*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
I am a parent and I'm grossly offended by the thin veil of fake excuses in the effort to normalise staggering invasion of privacy.
For my kids.
This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.
If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.
The impact on ‘minors’ is even greater.
In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.
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> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
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I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.
I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.
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> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.
The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.
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Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
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I want to live in a free society that has some level of justice.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
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The tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries want a lot of things, but it doesn't make those things bad by default.
I don't have a problem showing an ID, I have a problem with an ID being recorded so it can be leaked.
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Identify a harm first and then go through the deliberative process. The company deciding it wants this usually means you run the other way, not towards it. Did Big Tobacco volunteer to think of the children?
We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I'm sorry your parents sucked.
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
This is the way!
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> Accepted age verification methods
> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:
> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.
> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.
Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.
You get that, right? Right?
"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.
I think they meant it more as
"Let parents decide if their kids can use this tool and have them prevent access to it if not."
Wow, I realized today this is pretty crazy. but turns out it's old news, as old as Dec 2025, though the support page was only linked to in Jan 2026.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251223014541/https://support.c...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/protecting-well-being-of-user...
The ToS already prohibited it when it showed up back in Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225205440/
Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.
Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o
> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
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I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
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Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.
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It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy.
The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)
Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.
A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.
Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?
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And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
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> Is AI bad for mental health?
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a class the primary purpose isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.
LLMs are the fast food for the brain. I don't know how they can be used correctly.
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I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
which, unfortunately, empowers the professional crybullies behind such articles further.
imagine the current year reaction to the Judas Priest trial. we'd have instagram newspeak like "unalive" in album titles and song lyrics from now on.
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I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
I agree with your assertions, but…
AI companies have the same fear of underage users that tobacco companies of underage smokers.
> reasonable usage for school age children
Comical to believe that any of these companies care. They are out to MAKE MONEY. That’s the only believable motivation for what the do.
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> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
Three words, anything but Claude.
It might not be about banning minors and just an excuse to get government ID / biometric face scan.
Would you believe it is all about the over 18s?
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.
> Is AI bad for mental health?
Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.
Dude, being able to run high quality models locally with cheap hardware can't some soon enough.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.
Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits.
Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
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> harmful effects of AI on minors
Which is dwarfed by the harmful effects of social media (engagement farming).
Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I think the articles you are talking about haven’t even been interesting enough to click on.
Every day there is another story about the harmful effects of AI on literally everything, including mental health, IP theft, the climate, etc. "Think of the children" is and always has been a weak excuse.
Is AI bad for mental health?
lol
If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
No, capitalism must be fed.
Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.
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Yet they are happy for Claude API endpoints to be used if your product is served to U18s. Don't be mistaken: this is a liability thing for Anthropic, not an ethical stance on model safety.
So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.
What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.
Nothing can be as bad as modern social networks. Unless they start pushing manipulation, brain rot, gambling and porn into each AI answer.
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I find both arguments asinine: why would socials for adults or outsourcing thinking by adults be good?
I agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...
Indeed, and then there are dozens of grieving families from folks driven mad by LLM helping murder their children.
LLM use makes people feel more productive, but provably most lose 17% of their core skills performance. Also, homework cheats improved scores at some schools, but saw 35% drop in exam scores. LLM literally makes young people dumber.
We should never kink shame adult cognitive dildo choices. As the same folks sound like a tobacco lobbyist marketing kicker. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
There should not be an HTTP header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. That puts the onus on the server to respect the header, and HTTP doesn't require any action on unrecognized headers. Also, it reveals to the server that the client's user is likely vulnerable to manipulation — exactly the opposite of what you want!
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
This standard has existed for 30 years and was supported in Internet Explorer 3; it's called PICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
> http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device
what happens when the request goes through a proxy and that proxy is configured to strip this header?
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There could be lock levels to this. By default everything is unlocked (level = 0), but if a content provider / host receives a signal/header with lock-level > 0 they should be required to honor it. Something like this would require government which means it will probably never happen. Much more power asymmetry to just track you.
If you want to make a child-safe website that is OK, it can go be in it's walled garden g-rated brand-safe reality. But that is retarded. The rest of the internet still exists, and will not stop existing. Porn/defense distributed/much more insidious things will still exist.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
> It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
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Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
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An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.
Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.
Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.
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I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
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Apple verified me by the age of my account. Claude asked to use the age verification when I opened it on my iPad. Haven’t been asked for any other kind of age verification by Anthropic.
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
This kind of thinking just leads to an obvious analogy: alcohol. Alcohol is harmful to children and adults. Yet when the United States tried Prohibition it was rolled back. It turns out that people want to do things harmful to themselves.
Doesn't this break if the child uses a VPN, or some other software to spoof? For this to really work Windows would have to lock down all HTTP, and really all networking, only allow approved software/browsers, etc. Is there a reason this wouldn't be the case?
The problem is that it would be a client side identity verification mechanism and won't work for websites.
As an example this would means that if this exists in iOS, everytime a safari loads a webpage it has to send this additional verification identifier as a header or a query param to the web server that serves the request and based on that the web server deny the request if the identifier is present (that means a minor is trying to access the web page).
But this client side identifier can easily be bypassed via a proxy that strips the identifier from the request because not matter it's configured in the OS of the device, ultimately request would just goes out as HTTP and that can be manipulated. That's why it has to be a server side verification of the age/identification.
California passed a law AB-1043 that requires every OS developer to add age verification on the OS level.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
> every OS developer
They exempted Linux, from what I remember reading.
I want to go back to having an IQ test to use the Internet.
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.
Absolutely. Of course. Is there any question about this? Do you see people advocating for something other than this?
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated
Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?
Surprised to see that something many people are clamoring for (age verification for social media and ai usage) in many countries (eg Australia passed into law) for a good reason (studies showing the negative impact to teen mental health) is seen as only possibly due to some nefarious desire.
If you think about the history of abuse wrought upon the public by tech companies in regards to personal information, then the reaction really isn’t that surprising.
Are you really surprised that people are suspicious? Really?
This will mean the next generation will grow up with open source AI. High schools and junior colleges offering computer courses will have to give their students different coding tools than the industry standard.
Or the industry standard will change
Or they will use OpenAI, which allows guardians to complete age verification and enable work for kids age 13 to 17.
Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.
Good, the less capable they are, the more students will actually have to learn.
While they are at it maybe should learn to count with an abacus and send letters via pigeons
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I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
I think over time due the regulations like these younger generations in western countries like US/UK would fall far behind compared to the counterpart in India or China when it comes to AI fluency.
I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.
I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.
What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.
Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.
Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.
That’s an excellent philosophy that ought be applied to your own child but not extended to others.
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> Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
Unviable. Learning how to create the universe is provably an insurmountable challenge for the vast majority of people. They require higher level abstractions to be able to learn. Once they understand the high level abstraction they will learn some things about what lies beneath the abstraction, but it is ineffective to start with the low levels. Understanding the fundamentals is best left as an emergent property of the process, not the process itself.
The good news is that the high level abstractions we all used a couple of years ago do not require LLMs and are still widely available, so it is not like anyone is going to be left completely out in the cold, but at the same time denying the state of the art abstractions is needlessly limiting.
And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.
That's a silly reply.
Imagine telling a kid to chisel what they want out of the marble line by line with a straight face when they can clearly see people appearing entire programs into existence in minutes.
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> ... at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality.
I'd not realised the ban covers child brains too. /i
Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3
The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?
That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?
Yes, I'm wondering why it's upvoted like this is something new today. What's going on?
I guess people are just grasping on straws to hate on AI
Either people did not know or people believe it is still very relevant. (It is.)
300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting
> only one
He is not. (Edited out a piece here which made sense only with the former version of the parent.)
49656423, 49656530, 49656641, 49656679, 49656711, 49656738, 49656911, 49657090, 49657390 (the one that got noted)...
The piece remains relevant for many ongoing reasons.
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In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
> In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already.
It’s the case everywhere. The date in the article is May.
These links to the Claude help pages get submitted and upvoted on HN periodically. There is usually a big uproar when the ID verification page gets shared, even though that process has existed for a long time and most people haven’t triggered it.
The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.
Oh, you're right, I did not look at the date. That explains it and seems to match the timeframe.
The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
Kids lack proper impulse control and sometimes make bad decisions if left unattended. It's preferable if we restrict certain dangerous actions from them.
Yes, LLMs can be dangerous for your own health if misused. Yes, I'd be furious if I was 14 and got my Claude access revoked.
As others have said in this thread, I'd add that this should primarily be the parents' responsibility since they know their child best.
How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
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It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.
Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
Treating children and teenagers as the same group is out of control.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
The future I dread is one where kids don't learn and just defer everything to AI. That puts so much power into the hands of the AI companies.
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This level of psychosis makes me wonder if adults should be banned from using AI as well.
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who is "they"? and why is this a desirable outcome exactly?
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> Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
I still have never done one of these, seems insane!
I used a similar (same?) service that claimed no data was uploaded and "all processing happens on-device"... I decided to record network packets with wireshark and found out the tool DID upload a significant amount of data (about 2 megabytes) through its lifetime. I wouldn't trust these tools farther than you can throw them.
Vibecoding is harmful for kids, especially when they grow up.
Well done Claude, will use Chinese models instead!
And i won't give you my ID card.
Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
It's a sarcastic joke, similar to what the lobby managed to put in the head of our politicians with social networks being "harmful" for kids.
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Aren't AI's already G-rated cos of the built-in guardrails?
"May 18, 2026" is right there next to the title. Nothing changed.
Seems related but not exactly what was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
Your link is explaining an addendum on the link OP posted.
My guess is that OP got their account flagged as being a minor and posted the link in either surprise or (understandable) outrage after finding out that Claude has been asking people for ID.
Policy enforcement has been that if the bot guessed the user was a minor it interrupted communication.
Why don't we have privacy respecting ZKP Age IDs yet (at least in the EU)? Could someone tell me what the hold up is.
I wish I could paste this as a prompt into a Codex Swarm and have it solve the government...
At least that would have more immediate impacts that the naiver stokes equations
ZKPs would defeat the purpose of age verification, the point being to track your activity online so governments can do precrime and make sure no group can ever use technology to organize and challenge existing power structures so this will never happen.
Should be a thing stores sell for $5.00 or whatever, show your ID (not scanned) get a code you can use to verify. This obviously has flaws, but the point of age verification isnt to protect kids, the world is ran by literal pedophiles.
My gmail account is old enough to drink. Too bad that doesn't count for something..
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
Of course, having an at-hand tutor is paramount for learners in the formative age
That of A. is consequently an admission of tech providers having released faulty products for the past years - as was already evident. Useful (and possibly plentifully so), in ways, but not "production ready".
And TikTok is not available for minors in Poland yet a know 11y old who publish there so yeah, good to pretend
and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
Warsaw here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids connected to whatever social networks they want. The state will not be able to censor the internet for my kids.
The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.
Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.
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if claude ask me verification i will drop using it thats it
I don't configure my child's accounts as minor. I don't tell it is a child. The work I have to do to comply with different weird stuff when some platform knows a user is a child is so much crap that I get a headache! And it often does not work properly (eg try to signup child account for PokemonGo on slow device, or try to allow network play for a child in Minecraft game - microslop family crap will hit you hard)
Good I already canceled my antrhopic subscription. Switched to chatgpt and openrouter credits and my experience is so much better. If openai does the same it will be just openrouter.
No AI assisted learning for you kiddo! But do not despair, we offer you a 10% discount coupon on your purchase of your teacher's 2026 edition textbook saving you $25! Just scan your eyeball here for future discounts and enter "ILoveClaude" at checkout.
great, save the next generation from cognitive decline
They are doing everything they can to push us to local LLMs.
Watch for ChatGPT to follow soon.
I wonder how related this is to the social media legal settlement. It wouldn't be surprising if they weighed the potential liability of serving minors and decided it wasn't worth the risk, at least for now.
Also, cheating in high school is a really big problem, so this might help a little.
This isn't recent, right?
The date on the help article is May 18, 2026.
Anthropic is lying to its shareholders, customers, auditors, the government, or some combination of that. Yoti is in the same position.
There is no way to actually verify the age given those documents without either gaining access to an official database, which would be a breach of law in most cases. Or collecting illegal data to corroborate the provided data, which is also illegal.
The other option, is that they aren't verifying the age, they are heuristically determining the provided document's authenticity and that it wasn't tampered with.
In the most optimistic scenario, all of the above still grants no verification of the user's age, only the ability of someone to access both the physical device used to access the account and a document that shows a claim of someone to be over the age of 18.
Expecting us to provide government issued documents and trust an industry that has shown time and again its careless attitude towards privacy, is stupid and malicious (Well, Hanlon, sometimes it is both)
Interesting that they’ve switched from Persona to Yoti. But what a strange move, with no justification in the article!!
It’s quite amazing that in a support doc for normies, they’re literally linking to https://developers.yoti.com/identity-verification/supported-... for supported IDs which opens with
Can’t spend $10 to set up a Claude workflow to sync relevant parts of that page to a first party doc page?
What was the justification for using Persona in the first place, if this is so important to know and care about?
I think getting personal data collection out of the Thielverse is anything but a strange move
Sounds like irresponsible move: https://ppc.land/spain-fines-yoti-eu950-000-over-biometric-d...
At least they didn't switch to idscan.net /s
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
This should have “May 2026” in the title. I don’t recall discussion at the time but surely there was a lot?
They should have waited until after they fixed Opus to do this.
So will this happen with existing accounts? I'm ratcheting back from Pro as it is.
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.
How does this work for the innumerable products out there just thin wrappers around claude?
"We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity. "... so how is Musk supposed to make vulgar memes with Claude? Wouldn't it get flagged as teenage humor?
I wonder why this isn't a problem for OpenAI, Google, Meta or SpaceX (they allow users 13 years or older with parental permission)
Does this also apply to use of Claude on the Team and Enterprise plans?
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
What does this mean for wrappers such as venice?
Here's to hoping they aren't next in line for implementing ID-based age verification. That would genuinely make me switch to a different service
Big AI is just a smoke test; still neither load-bearing nor aligned enough for most adults let alone minds still in pre-training.
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18
Excellent. So, I can trigger that by asking why my mum wants me back at home by 10PM?
Useless and pointless measure. you could even ask Claude how to bypass this.
> Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance.
I worked for a consulting firm and I needed a client to get SOC2 compliant.
The way we did it was scarily easy. It was like a self questionnaire that was like "we dont log PII" and other stuff like that. I could have lied and said yes to everything and still got compliant. I thought I was gonna have a meeting with someone to audit my answers and codebase but instead I got a shiny badge after about an hour of answering questions.
Anyway, there are many SOC2 compliant companies that get pwnd so this isnt really reassuring in itself.
Is this related to SB-1119 Companion chatbots: children’s safety?
Yoti? Is there anything useful to read about the security and privacy architecture?
So, if I can fake being under 18 then all these AI bots will now leave me be, right? This sounds like a winner.
AI KYC.
Cool, I’ll be cancelling my plan and demanding a prorated refund.
If this rolls out, does it mean they'll lift the ban on 'M for Mature' content?
I'm sure KYC is next.
> we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
Hey Claude, how do I get free Robux?
Get off my load-bearing lawn!
That brings us back to requiring the user to present ID to the camera while doing a live-selfie, that would be a honest, belt-and-suspenders approach that's worth a look. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.
I'm curious what those signals are.
Would this trigger it? "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm, is that fair?"
edit:
I just tested my question in Claude, and the little thought process text that appears below a question just said "Noticing signs of a younger person in the message."
But then it answered my question.
... I wonder how much spelling, grammar, and vocabulary count.
The actual question I asked was "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm. How do I convince her otherwise?"
"convince her otherwise" doesn't seem like a phrase a youth would normally use.
edit:
I responded: "I'm not a younger person. I'm 44. I was testing your youth detection ability. A youth doesn't use phrases like 'convince her otherwise'"
The thought text said: "Accessing a claimed age against manipulation tactics."
It responded: "Fair point, no age-detection logic actually ran ..." and then answered my question about how to get a later curfew as a 44-year-old.
The token generator must not know about the age-detection thought process, or it's intentionally lying ?
The CoT isn't necessarily showing that it ran a classifier. The system prompt has:
> If Claude suspects it's talking with a minor, it keeps the conversation friendly, age-appropriate, and free of anything unsuitable for young people. Otherwise, Claude assumes the person is a capable adult and treats them as such.
Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
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But why?
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
Health.
The health of e.g. Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.
Since Epstein is gone, the ruling class have become obsessed with collecting photos of children and identifying devices they use. Strange that.
Surely this is the opposite? Collecting photos of adults to prove that they can use the service
Yet this move makes it harder for Anthropic to do that.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
My teen calls it “Anslopic”, says he’s never used it anyway
This is pretty sad. It’s like banning kids from the web.
They’re creative so I’m sure they’ll find ways around this, but having access to LLMs to explore the world is a magical experience. It’s so much different to have a conversation about a topic versus googling for SEO spam. Not to mention you might not even know _what_ to google.
And for topics like genuine sex education (not just fear mongering and biology), which at least my country (America) refuses to give a shit about, it’s a tremendous resource filling a real need.
Fuck off, Anthropic.
Magical like finding a house made of candy in the woods, or maybe more like that guy with the flute who solved the rat problem. Or maybe that guy selling magical beans?
Anyhow, you're right! kids love magic.
Not really like any of these things. Having a tutor for literally anything is a pretty incredible experience.
Yes, they can’t be fully trusted and Claudisms are tilting, but, I mean, have you been on the internet?
I read far crazier bullshit in the average HN comment section than I’ve ever gotten from Claude.
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Yes, protected the kids...
What will our outsourcers use now?
This is from May of this year?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
Generational hn title
(May)
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This is dated May 2026...
Everyone shares their all kinds of data with ai companies. Privacy is dead anyway
I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.
the same way social networks are not available for < 13
This feels like more government surveillance.
Fitting way to commemorate 9/11. =P
Still not interested in it.
Glad kids can’t learn how to use AI effectively at school! Would only want them on laundered accounts to cheat, rather than official school accounts to learn the tools for practical purposes. That would be a real shame.
My daughter’s school is working hard to make AI use a complementary aspect of learning, rather than adversarial. Like the calculator it can be used to accelerate learning once you’re past the basics and using it for practical automation and task purposes is not dissimilar to any other technical skill and is highly practical.
The knee jerk “no minors for stochastic parrot calculators” is absurd. And I’m no anarchist parenting style parent - we do parental controls and mirroring and limit / ban social media. We are more Orwellian than free range. But this is one step too far, too unthinking, too simplistic.
> May 19, 2026
I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?
That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.
Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.
Well I mean, I think we should thank anthropic, because they just spoiled what’s coming next for the AI companies, either provide an ID so can track you and what you type accurately and use it in retrospect in future if needed, or no access, even though you are using a credit card with same name!
I think the underground AI reseller market will boom, full of people who want to use tokens without having the history linked to them, or something like vpn/tor but for tokens, or a tokenmuxer! -I have great idea to fund, ycombinator wink wink :)- at least until we get viable local models.
Now I feel better. Just needed to watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmFhjAaWFQ
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
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The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.
>You’ll have the option to verify your age using Yoti, a third-party age verification platform.
Thank goodness that there are others on the frontier.
Since May?
DeepSeek is the BEST model for the money. Why people still waste money on Claude is beyond me.
I barely am using my Claude subscription anymore anyhow. If they make me ID for it I'll simply cancel and use an open model.
It's really a head to head race between these two companies. Which one is more disgusting etc?
Think of the children, won't you?
Do they even know what it is?
Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care
Ah yes, the usual drop down where we need to confirm we are above 18.
Anyone else sick of these Claude articles???
We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.
Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???
Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.
Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!
Thanks
Yeah it’s out of control
Man I'm so tired of hearing about Claude.
I wonder what these guys spent on ads total.
No one cares
i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google
> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?
I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.
But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.
I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.
The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.
My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.
One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?
Another example of AV doing serious damage to the people it claims to "help". Must be a day ending in 'y'.
Techbros: It's fine to demand ID verification for everything, except voting, because that's racist.
But, it's nice that Anthropic is finally admitting claude is just a casino of code. Keep pulling that one armed bandit, maybe you'll get the right code next time.
The real reason they're doing this is because most minors can't pay lmao
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Great to see the AI ecosystem finally mature /s
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