Comment by embedding-shape
17 hours ago
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/
Took a bit of poking, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDQ5z7bNPs
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And one of the rare incidences of the MPAA ratings banner appearing in the middle of a film.
Joke's on you, as standards loosen now PG-13 movies get up to eleven "fuck"s to distribute throughout the film (nineteen for documentaries)
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Fear of a Black Hat, a rap mockumentary in the same vein as This is Spinal Tap, begins with a warning about the language in the movie that's essentially them repeating the offending words three or four times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmaaZtINRU
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.
"May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product.
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do you have an example of this? it feels like a suboptimal response even given the stupid, heavy-handed legislation you cite.
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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
Great story! I remember sharing my screen at work recently and the URL bar suggested https://thisisnotporn.com/ because I had been playing it a bit on my phone and my browser history synced to my work. I dont know if anyone caught it but I started using a different browser after that. Because it indeed is not porn but hard to explain that!
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.
Add beauty pageants to that list. It's gross, and a lot of people are ok with it.
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.
What use is this when you can just prompt the LLM to insert those or use any other style of writing that looks human?
and its 1 pixel wide. I propose the term pixtit
Also the Dixel for the male option.
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.
Whilst this is OP's point, the reality is the majority of big tech companies have been treating user data like radioactive waste for 10+ years.
Most user data is of minimal economic value, until you leak it, and then suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way.
Better to not hold the data in the first place.
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Whose cause? I think the government already has our IDs, given that they issued them.
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We don't want your static ID, we want where and what you are at this moment in order to better tune the algorithm. Your ID is frozen in time, so at any given moment, big tech knows more about you than the government does. IDs are only good for minimal verification purposes.
Its actually to leak your gov't ID so data brokers can soak it up
QAnon for nerds
It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.
Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.
The whole thing is pointless.
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EU parliament gets bonuses?
Bank? So now you know what bank they use?
This is why you have a relay in the middle.
Then, Chase knows you've verified your ID somewhere, the relay knows that some Chase user verified themselves at Pornhub, and Pornhub knows that the user is over 18, without knowing their identity or what bank they're using.
You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. The latter is more secure but more complex, the former is much simpler and openness friendly.
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I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”.
Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”
Well, they already know your credit card issuer, it's not that wild. Really Visa/MasterCard should offer age verification on their network... They have all the necessary components.
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?
Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money.
GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly.
[1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a "full-mesh" of partnering of every SP with every bank directly would not scale.
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I trust my bank a whole lot more than I trust Anthropic
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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
I think many linux users will apparently have been born on Jan 1 1970
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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.
I can't figure out if you're joking or not.
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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.
Right, Sending off my data to some random 3rd party company with far lower stakes does not make me feel better.
I 105 percent trust anything and everything a zillion dollar company promises!
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.
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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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-...
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.
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.
Don’t care. Will not provide them with my documents either. So will not be using anthropic services.
If you believe that you’ll buy my NFT.
Didn’t that id verification service that just had the massive breach also say similar about data retention? Doesn’t matter if they delete if the data is being intercepted somewhere along the line.
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.
Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most.
People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.
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Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
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Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.
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I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.
The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.
So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.
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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?
I'm sure many use their parents' credit card. In which case, the parent would do the "verification" and the minor uses the account anyway.
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."
So in your example a microwave company should be held liable if someone puts a child in a microwave?
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.
>And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
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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.
Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.
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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.
I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.
But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.
Because Anthropic would never sell ad space. Promise. /s
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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.
You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.
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you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?
Truly naive is the mirror you're looking into.
We agree these are useless contrivances, but positing constantly that "this is just some great surveillance game" as opposed to the offloading of government responsibilities to private industry in the hope of removing all social regulatory liabilities?
Naive is how you spell that.
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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?
Yes multiple companies in people's favorite acronyms.
Some people are just better pattern matchers
Being good at matching patterns doesn't mean the patterns you found have the causal relationships you think they have
Superstition in pigeons: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001
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That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
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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
“Suspicion is the same as fact”
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.
sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.
*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.
Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.
> 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.
> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...
The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.
Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.
Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.
There's a lot of myopic comments about children on HN, but this argument is so insane it's worth pointing out.
You're essentially arguing to poison a well instead of inconveniencing yourself. You have agency, you're allegedly intelligent. But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.
There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
A minor that's educated enough to build their own is a different topic, but so many unmotivated or uniformed humans would quit if Claude simply didn't work. The barrier to entry is supposed to be the validation of comprehension.
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Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p
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Counterargument, everyone lived a childhood, but not everyone lives adulthood, so childhood affects more people. Also related, childhood is foundational, what happens in childhood forms who you are as an adult, so issues in childhood affect you as an adult too.
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.