Identity verification on Claude

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude

by bathory • 1 month ago

866 724 1 month ago

support.claude.com

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_...

xmstan• 1 month ago

Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.

It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...

stingraycharles3• 1 month ago

Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality

From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.

These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.

Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.

fjsoxjdnwk2• 1 month ago

The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas.

That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.

The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.

slim3• 1 month ago

you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries

inigyou13• 1 month ago

Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.

bitmasher9• 1 month ago

Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets.

It’s not entirely dissimilar.

coldtea3• 1 month ago

Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.

hdndjsbbs• 1 month ago

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

gentooflux3• 1 month ago

The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves

everforward• 1 month ago

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.

This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).

Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.

The two most significant factors at the physical level are

1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.

2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.

AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.

bko• 1 month ago

Maybe because all the predictions of the very vocal net neutrality crowd didn't manifest. It got memory holed and life just moved on. The only outcome was maybe a few cell phone carriers bumping your bandwidth limits for netflix streaming

thinkingtoilet• 1 month ago

Net neutrality is about the public infrastructure. This is a private company. I'm not happy with what Anthropic is doing, but it's a very large and obvious difference.

slim3• 1 month ago

what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?

halJordan3• 1 month ago

In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums.

Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.

epolanski2• 1 month ago

This is gonna bite the US long term very bad.

With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.

cyanydeez2• 1 month ago

Isn't that because America has gone full fascist and a lot of white collar people fear the 'permanent underclass' and would rather buy lube than 'resist'

nicce• 1 month ago

It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...

Same? Multitude of magnitues worse. The amount of data and type that is given here is from different level. ISPs have mostly seen it in encrypted format.

KaiserPro• 1 month ago

THe reason why its not being talked about like net neutrality is because there aren't large companies with a vested interested interest in changing the status quo

Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc

Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners.

The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.

DarkVanilla• 1 month ago

Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc

That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers.

The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1].

Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC.

not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc

If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet.

[1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically

miki1232117• 1 month ago

Why aren't we talking about bank neutrality?

slashdave4• 1 month ago

ISPs are legally protected. AI companies are not.

usernamed73• 1 month ago

Let us hope this only accelerates the proliferation of local models

forgetfreeman10• 1 month ago

There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.

jckahn• 1 month ago

That's not the option most are going to take.

baq6• 1 month ago

That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.

i2km• 1 month ago

Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s

usernamed73• 1 month ago

That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.

baq6• 1 month ago

Serving barely useful GLM 5.2 costs what? $15k? Actually useful is like $50k? You’ll never recoup the cost unless you ‘locally’ means ‘inference provider is not the model provider’?

polski-g• 1 month ago

You can recoup the costs quicker if you resell access to your local LLM on a reselling service.

fractorial• 1 month ago

Not "local" in the literal sense, but I set it up to serve at half quant for $23/hr and full quant for $35/hr.

You don't need to have it always on? This is a far cry from "$200/month," but I do not think it's $50k for "useful." Do you see it differently?

verdverm3• 1 month ago

$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered (a year ago it would have been more expensive, one person can spend that in a month or two)

I bought my spark and the models have already improved in that time (qwen3.6, speculative decoding 2x tgen, diffusion gemma 4x tgen) and I expect this to improve. Look out another 2-3 years, local is going to be very competitive.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

Yes they mean open weight models offered by various providers

adrian_b2• 1 month ago

The high costs are necessary for high speed.

When a low speed of the order of one token per second is accepted, any open weights LLM can be run on an ordinary PC (with the weights read from SSDs) and the cost becomes negligible.

Such a low speed would be annoying for a chat, but I do not believe that it is "barely useful" for a coding assistant. There are plenty of tasks for which it is fine to get results some hours later or even overnight, and batching multiple tasks can complete them in about the same time as a single task.

jijji• 1 month ago

glm-5.2 is available for $20/month on ollama.com and is IMHO more functional than the $200/month claude max subscription. you can even use the same claude harness [0]. You get about 20x more token usage at 10x less the price.

[0] https://ollama.com/library/glm-5.2

nairboon• 1 month ago

It will. Moves like this will only lead to a drift of brains and talents to tweak & tune open harnesses and open models.

JimDabell4• 1 month ago

OpenAI also has this kind of check. What is especially bad is that if you fail the verification process, they won’t let you retry – you are permanently locked out from the top models. They aren’t clear about this upfront during the process, so make sure the lighting is good when you scan your ID!

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...

inigyou13• 1 month ago

Or make a new account?

tartoran• 1 month ago

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

JimDabell4• 1 month ago

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

trashface• 1 month ago

Yep this is what caused me to switch to Anthropic from OpenAI a few months back, couldn't use any model newer than GPT-4 even if I paid for credits, unless I did a biometric check. I guess I'll move to perplexity or deepseek or something if anthropic flags me for the same.

cassianoleal• 1 month ago

GLM-5.2 has been very good

arikrahman• 1 month ago

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

maxloh• 1 month ago

That is a really terrible design.

I dealt with a few instances of online ID verification recently, and in my experience, they don't close your application when your photo is not clear. They mark it as "awaiting customer response" and kindly ask you to upload again.

nottorp• 1 month ago

Claude couldn't vibe code that loop.

bathory• 1 month ago

Anthropic claim that if you have a verification issue, they will give you support; remains to be seen what that will actually come down to

MarkMarine• 1 month ago

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

slim3• 1 month ago

or you can scan you retina using sam altmans device and get access immediately /s

halJordan3• 1 month ago

That's almost certainly just bad engineering/bad business. Not to say it wasn't an active choice, I'm sure it was. It just shows how extreme the power imbalance is between end users and big business that they have 0 desire to do things correctly and end users have 0 impact on correcting that thinking.

LPisGood• 1 month ago

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

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

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

AnonEM00se• 1 month ago

I got an email from OpenAI letting me know I won’t be a teenager anymore next week. It’s so exciting to have AI roll back my age by more than half!

I then looked at their age verification and it used that problematic company so I cancelled out.

chasil• 1 month ago

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

Why on earth not?

DocTomoe• 1 month ago

As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...

what did you do to trigger a verification process?

miki1232117• 1 month ago

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

stressback• 1 month ago

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

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

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

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

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

miki1232117• 1 month ago

Thankfully, OpenAI's check is not required if you use their models through OpenRouter!

This didn't use to be the case (OpenRouter's OpenAI access used to be bring-your-own-key), but they've reached some sort of deal with them a couple months ago, and now you can access all the GPT-5 series models on OR with no verification at all.

ai_fry_ur_brain3• 1 month ago

Why did you provide an ID to use an LLM... You're a mark

pbgcp20262• 29 days ago

This is downvoted unfairly - "this guys fucks" :-) Indeed you attracted attention.

dotancohen• 1 month ago

From that page:

At this time, retries are not supported. You can continue using OpenAI’s platform with your existing access.

That's ridiculous, especially as their list of reasons that verifications can fail include "There was a technical issue during submission".

varispeed2• 1 month ago

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

RobMurray2• 1 month ago

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

egorfine2• 1 month ago

they won’t let you retry

Why would they care about _you_ when they have just a bit short of a billion users and they are up for a huge IPO? Of course they won't even bother implementing a retry.

BeetleB2• 1 month ago

OpenAI also has this kind of check.

Indeed, that's what motivated me to get an OpenRouter account!

jingpostmedia• 1 month ago

Worth noting that China implemented mandatory real-name verification for generative AI services back in 2023. The practical effect wasn't just about preventing misuse -- it created a two-tier system where verified users get full capabilities while others get heavily restricted outputs. What's interesting is how quickly the market adapted: local open-source models partly flourished because they sidestep these requirements. Western providers are now walking a similar path, but without the digital identity infrastructure China already had in place.

da_grift_shift2• 1 month ago

Worth noting that posting LLM-generated comments violates the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

(Detractors: I encourage you to turn "showdead" on in your HN settings and view its other comments before you jump to defense!)

badgersnake• 1 month ago

How does a company verify its age?

inigyou13• 1 month ago

Doesn't say anything about age.

idoxer• 1 month ago

It does at the end of the article, under 18 will be banned

loloquwowndueo• 1 month ago

Probably easier than with a person. A company has incorporation documents which exist in an already-verified public registry and have dates and other information.

Razengan2• 1 month ago

How does a dark lord born before the beginning of time verify its age?

da_grift_shift2• 1 month ago

This particular IDV flow will be used with consumer Claude web accounts only.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003

Artoooooor• 1 month ago

Every time I consider renting a service from Anthropic, they drop such bomb. Full capability with pre-agreed price per token and no ID verification. That's what I demand.

alden5• 1 month ago

I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.

Rooster61• 1 month ago

I really don't like that headlines have been surfacing about the US government putting pressure on Anthropic, and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).

I may very well stop using Claude due to this.

Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.

EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 month ago

I suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government to re-enable Fable. Whatever "safety/security" measures the government requires of Anthropic will no doubt also be applied to other US "AI providers", perhaps based on assessed model capability. Apparently OpenAI already had an ID check in place before this.

What's going to be interesting is how the US government regulates US-based access to Chinese AI models, whether served domestically (e.g. GLM-5.2 from Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, etc), or from overseas.

I suppose if one fear is US domestic terrorists/hackers using AI, then restricting access to all models, regardless of country of origin, might make sense, but as far as restricting technology exports over national security concerns it wouldn't make much sense to restrict access to foreign models!

Crudely applied restrictions are likely to get worse before they potentially get better as the hype wears down and AI risk gets better assessed, but government control tends to be a one-way ratcheting up, so who knows. It's not inconceivable that the government may try to restrict use of local models too, which they could do by making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.

anon373839• 1 month ago

suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government

I would have put “negotiations” in scare quotes. Who reported the Fable jailbreak to the government? Anthropic’s biggest shareholder. Who is now sitting at the table designing the “benchmarks” that will dictate what other model builders will be allowed to deploy? Anthropic. Who is also in talks with the government about a bailout? Also Anthropic. I just can’t take any of this at face value because that’s preposterous.

rescbr2• 1 month ago

making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.

So giving another win to China?

lostmsu• 1 month ago

May I remind you to download GLM 5.2 weights for just in case?

tiahura6• 1 month ago

What new requirement? The linked page is months old.

ericmay• 1 month ago

It seems very likely that AI tools like this will end up with citizenship verification whether it’s American, Chinese, or European. Governments are going to want to know when you try and plan an assassination, or develop a novel pathogen, or start writing manifestos that go against the orthodoxy. And they’re going to want to make sure if you are a criminal or deemed to be one you can’t keep up in the economy due to neutered AI access.

I’m not condoning this, just speculating.

Aurornis6• 1 month ago

and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).

They’ve had this process in place for a long time.

This page is not new or recent. Someone just found it and submitted it again. It’s been discussed on HN months ago if you want to go look.

slashdave4• 1 month ago

Of course you don't like it. Which is why it is being spread around, even though it has nothing to do with Fable.

donohoe• 1 month ago

Not quite - this page has been there and saying this since April, so ~3 months ago.

I_am_tiberius• 1 month ago

I just hope there's huge protest. I hope people just cancel the subscription. I fear people will just accept the terms. The result will be a kill switch for the US government and a clean distinction between national and foreign users so spying will become legal. Surely Anthropic hasn't allowed the NSA connect so far, - openai clearly did (see their board members).

macic• 1 month ago

Very disappointing that they went with Persona, the company whose CEO regularly argues with people on Twitter and lies about their arguments.

dofm10• 1 month ago

Then again they are renting data centre space from SpaceX, so there's a pattern.

consumer451• 1 month ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633 - 67 days ago, 100 comments

As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.

Discord dropped them after user backlash.

RaSoJo2• 1 month ago

I agree. Given the very recent Discord pullback, this feels forced upon Anthropic.

I suspect that Anthropic had to select from a set of government approved ID verifiers.

Considering Thiel's clout in the current govt's inner circle...3 out of the 4 choices would have been duds. Leaving the 4th as Persona, the only viable option

EmbarrassedHelp• 1 month ago

Any sort of identity/age verification here is problematic and unacceptable.

egorfine2• 1 month ago

a bit surprising and problematic

Not it's not. Evil companies like to do business together.

rvz• 1 month ago

No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.

Never been a better time to use local models.

comboy• 1 month ago

They all have everyone ID's through payments already..

polack2• 1 month ago

Yes, it’s the biometrics they’re after.

QuiEgo2• 1 month ago

to play devil's advocate, having a credit card does not tell Anthropic anything about your country of citizenship, which the US is pushing them to gate keep access on.

dofm10• 1 month ago

Yep.

dofm10• 1 month ago

They don't have nationality, I guess? Just card issuer origin and payment origin.

jacomoRodriguez3• 1 month ago

Just canceled my subscription. I don't want my id data end up with persona and/or the us gov.

furyofantares8• 1 month ago

Wouldn't want the government to have your government-issued ID.

I have no idea about Persona though.

tumdum_• 1 month ago

I know that this may sound surprising, but US is not the only country in the world ;)

hazaskull• 1 month ago

I would imagine this was written by someone not from the US.

woadwarrior012• 1 month ago

In the EU and UK, data protection legislation applies to governments' handling of their subjects' data too.

jacomoRodriguez3• 1 month ago

I'm not from the US. And given the current behaviour of said country, I don't want to hand them the capability to connect my AI chats with my identity (yes, I know that they quite probably can do that at will already - but I do not need to hand it over on a silver plate)

secretslol2• 1 month ago

I cancelled too, unfortunately! And like Louis Rossman has been saying recently about Anthropic, the folk are "Bad people". The Persona partnership also cements that. I finally have an excuse (need) to test the other high-end coding models on the scene - and might save myself close to 200 per month at the same time for a possible win.

Obscurity4340• 1 month ago

Which are you looking at?

RaSoJo2• 1 month ago

Is there any info on what these "certain capabilities" are?

0123456789ABCDE4• 1 month ago

likely mythos class models at first, but i wouldn't put it past them to expand that to the cyber verification program, or similar

verdverm3• 1 month ago

On the path to the rich and powerful deciding who does and does not get access to which ai models...

shevy-java5• 1 month ago

YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.

Razengan2• 1 month ago

Fuck.. How did y'all in the Land of the Free let it get this way

WhrRTheBaboons• 1 month ago

by continuing down the road they have been going on for ages now

truthbe3• 1 month ago

Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching

https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund

rcgy• 1 month ago

Can't get a refund if you're not a new subscriber.

holoduke• 1 month ago

For certain capabilities one can use uncensored models which can be found on huggingface. It's perfect for asking on how to create atomic bombs, meth labs, assassination plans, brute force hack scripts and more. You only need one or two h200 cards.

Overpower0416• 1 month ago

Yeah, not happening. Gonna hope for the open models getting better and staying with what I've got for now.

alaudet2• 1 month ago

100% the exact second I get some popup telling me to upload documents to continue is when claude pro gets decommissioned.

realusername• 1 month ago

Same, I won't upload ID documents for obvious security reasons

fortran77• 1 month ago

Where are these "certain capabilities" documentes?

alaudet2• 1 month ago

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...

"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."

verdverm3• 1 month ago

I'm very curious how they are going to handle enterprise accounts with mixed nationality / geography. In particular, what about an agent that runs in the cloud and triggers on events, built by a team with mixed people.

jjice• 1 month ago

I mean, this feels exactly what had to happen after their announcement with Fable being restricted by the US government since the requirement is that they need to know you're a US citizen. You can argue this is Anthropic's fault due to their Mythos/Fable fear mongering, but at the end of the day this is a requirement by the US government to use this (and likely future models).

I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.

Best I can do is root for local models (already was), but I'll keep my Anthropic subscription for their "lesser" models without an ID (for now).

fidotron• 1 month ago

One dimension of this which isn't discussed enough is this opens the road to inference providers silently discriminating against different users who will remain oblivious to what's going on. i.e. if you "fail" ID verification it's actually good that they tell you as opposed to serving you a malicious model instead.

aqua_coder• 1 month ago

This might seem unrelated but on one of my free accounts. I tried to make Claude do some historical fact checking on the inter-war period of the USSR. The point isn't if it is true or not, but it felt like it would help quite a lot to see what the sources Claude finds says about the both sides of the picture and I was curious at some point.

Funnily enough, a day after this my account got banned under the pretext that I was a child using Claude and that I would need to verify my account. The age verifier said that it doesn't store my photos or anything. It gets cheeky though and indirectly it says it doesn't store what I upload but sends it to third parties that do store and sell it. Its like saying I won't steal your money, but I will give it to the thief right over there for free. Now the flagging might be entirely coincidental, but I just exported my chats and just never went on with the intention to re verify my account (since it is a free one basically and there is no incentive for me to do so). Weirdly enough, I started to see my past chat history that I exported to check and see if there is any correlation between how I talked and if there might have been some instances in which the system might attribute said message as what a young person would say. Though from the looks of it, it didn't give any of that sort of vibe.

halJordan3• 1 month ago

That's the problem with all these heuristics i guess. No one but phd historians and kids writing essays research inter-war Soviet history.

Which is of course false, but you can imagine that's what the heuristics say is true 90% of the time.

We're gonna lose quite a long tail of interests and hobbies when the llms take over

Amir62• 1 month ago

I’ve been waiting for days for an appeal decision on a suspension that I have zero clue on why it happened! I’m trying very hard not to hate Anthropic right now!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861

christoph3• 1 month ago

It’s all over the place. A UK bank i’d been with 7+ years for a business savings account suddenly started demanding ID or they would “limit” access (lock my money up until I dance to their tune). They already have all this. My identity nor address have changed in 15 years. The account is super low activity savings. Zero possible red flags.

The verification process started out as “just a photo of my driving licence” - turned out to be a video recording of my whole environment with no obvious previous mention or disclaimer of this. Then the requirement for a “quick selfie” suddenly appeared (pretends to be a photo but is full video again), I complied up until the “do you want your data processed by AI or the lowest bid in India?”

I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.

Opened a new building society account, which is all paper based for ID. I shall be opening many more such building society accounts that only deal in paper for ID purposes in the coming weeks.

Amir62• 1 month ago

I especially hate it when there is absolutely zero recourse! In some cases you can go to the competition and in some you have no other option because some aspects of the service is setup as a monopoly or high friction exit process. I’m personally against any black box decision making that would disrupt someone’s life in any way.

johneth• 1 month ago

Out of pure curiosity, which UK bank was it?

gib444• 1 month ago

Over a £100k with a techbro fintech that isn't even a bank. My friend, you're a gambler!

spprashant• 1 month ago

Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.

greatgib• 1 month ago

So convenient so that the day that you go to visit USA or Trump has a grief against you, we can immediately identify your accounts and inspect all your life!

rzk• 1 month ago

How are we verifying?
We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner

See this related thread regarding Persona:

OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 - Feb 2026 (206 comments)

gcanyon• 1 month ago

If this is what it takes to get access to Fable I'll be sad, but go along with it. Fable was (at least in my testing) remarkably good.

nullbio• 1 month ago

This is why they do these things - because people just "go along with it."

preg_match5• 1 month ago

It’s a foundational problem of how the US economy is structured. As a consumer, your power and leverage will always be at a minimum. This is why a strong democracy matters so much in capitalist nations, and why the US has been struggling for the past 25 years with that.

airhangerf153• 23 days ago

You could go back to using your brain to code instead. My company pays for Claude, but we're on personal plans linked to corporate e-mail and company credit cards. If they require this from me, I'll ask my boss just to cancel or switch us to a business plan.

I do use it more these days, and it has helped me get a lot of grunt work out of the way, but I do noticeably realize it's killing my cognitive software engineering abilities.

It bothers me at many levels right now.

jauntywundrkind• 1 month ago

So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.

general1465• 1 month ago

This further confirms that self hosted LLM are the future. Today it is ID verification, tomorrow it will be only for US citizens and day after tomorrow only for US citizens who can get "Secret" clearance.

dang• 1 month ago

(Submitted URL was https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_... - we changed that to what looks like the original source, but put the Reddit link in the toptext for context.)

827a• 1 month ago

Its a very well known fact that all of our geopolitical adversaries have sophisticated fake American ID markets. This doesn't stop any of the most dangerous adversaries from getting access to systems protected by this technology. DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts and keep on keeping on. This just hurts normal people, Americans and non-Americans, who might struggle to authenticate or be disallowed because of their place of birth. Pointless CYA, and beneath a research group whose intention is to invent the machine god.

samename• 1 month ago

Thank you. This is an expansion of surveillance. Most concerning to me is how few people understand government's access to this data. People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.

christoph3• 1 month ago

Indeed - Persona is backed by Founders Fund - also linked to lovely companies like Palantir, Flock & Anduril. Some people still (claim they) can’t see the massive dragnet swirling around all of society right now.

tekchip• 1 month ago

Not just the government! techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/texas-government-data-breach-allowed-hackers-to-steal-3-million-drivers-licenses-and-passports/

psalaun• 1 month ago

People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.

Isn't the case for any US company? I'm working in an european SaaS business, and we consider that any data that goes through Azure or Google Workspace can be accessed by the US government on a whim, even if their datacenter is on our soil.

wahnfrieden• 1 month ago

They also force tap access to the data

nextaccountic2• 1 month ago

also it's not protected by the 4th amendment like an actual diary would, right? it's bullshit

jsyang00• 1 month ago

Pointless CYA

They are literally being forced to do this by the government. The counter-ask if for them to self immolate in order to take a principled stand, as access to all their models is banned.

transcriptase2• 1 month ago

Perhaps they should stop being holier than thou wackjobs and try the “shut the fuck up and act like a business” strategy of being a business.

Seems to be working for every other AI company.

mad_tortoise• 1 month ago

Or move to Europe/China/insert lovely tax haven here. They don't have to base their operations in the USA, they CHOOSE to. I will cancel my subscription because of this, and happily use DeepSeek/mimo or whatever else comes for a fraction of the cost. China won't and mostly can't do anything with my data, the US government can and certainly will.

I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.

alex_duf2• 1 month ago

It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5

They don't care if anyone is using a fake ID, they care that they can send the hot potato back to the American government. That gives them a legitimate "not my fault if people can make fake ids. In fact it's your fault"

SV_BubbleTime4• 1 month ago

Persona isn’t just an id upload. It’s also face scan by video.

Aurornis6• 1 month ago

It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5

This help page has been there for a long time. Long before Fable was announced.

Their ID process isn’t new.

They might use it in the future to gate access to Fable if they can conclude that it’s sufficient to comply with the regulation, but the fact that they had this process in place already and they’re not using it for the Fable situation suggests there’s more to it.

tamimio2• 1 month ago

disallowed because of their place of birth

I noticed this is normalized too, there’s a systematic discrimination just based on the fact where you were born, as if anyone controls that, and yes, you will be added on some list, get denied or further scrutiny based on that fact only.

bob1029• 1 month ago

I agree this is entirely theatrical.

There is much stronger IDV technology than this, but it isn't as consistent across the customer base. You would have a significantly more difficult time defeating something like Chexsystems with fake IDs. If the AI models are truly so scary as to require ITAR-style restrictions, then I wonder if having an adverse financial background might be a reasonable canary for preventing access. These same kinds of questions come up for obtaining security clearances.

Phelinofist2• 1 month ago

DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts

I'm rooting for China here, feels strange but well

cute_boi• 1 month ago

We are not collecting more than we need. We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity.

You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?

data-ottawa2• 1 month ago

The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.

So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.

I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.

From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.

There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.

The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.

azinman2• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.

wouldbecouldbe• 1 month ago

That's the implied suggestion from the verification that they can prove to only share it with US citizens

coldtea3• 1 month ago

That’s totally unclear.

Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...

Barbing• 1 month ago

Right, if we saw an open-source Mythos release today, I’d expect it to move the government’s idea of security goalposts.

jeromegv• 1 month ago

That’s totally unclear.

Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature.

Yes, lack of stability and clarity is entirely why people are steering away from the US. Yes things can change again next week, it's not a good thing.

OtomotO• 1 month ago

As is everything coming out of the US these days.

If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.

chillfox• 1 month ago

I can't build workflows on something that can randomly be unavailable for over a week.

At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.

pyeri• 1 month ago

Have you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.

stavros2• 1 month ago

If K2 or GLM 5.2 are on par with Opus 4.8 I'll eat my hat. They're good, but they're not that good. Deepseek V4 Pro has been better than Sonnet for me, but the only model that comes close to or surpasses Opus 4.8 is GPT-5.5.

pimeys2• 1 month ago

They are but from our evals for example GLM 5.2 (unquantized) performs as well as Opus but uses more tokens and takes more time.

I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.

fragmede6• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.

sourthyme• 1 month ago

Where does 5.5 beat Opus 4.8?

OccamsMirror• 1 month ago

This is just not true. Especially for frontend development. But I've compared them very recently one to one and Opus wins every time.

Some people have been saying that 5.5 is on par with Fable and it's just nonsense.

Animats• 1 month ago

The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

Note the big cut in token prices from China.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml

ignoramous2• 1 month ago

Note the big cut in token prices from China.

After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.

hulahoof• 1 month ago

If you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: https://omnigent.ai/

(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)

miki1232117• 1 month ago

They clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with.

This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.

calgoo2• 1 month ago

Sure if you want to share your ID and information with Persona.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632

rockskon• 1 month ago

That remains to be seen. Assuming the worst from the start discourages people from taking any action and is an imprudent way to approach political topics.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

Persona already had scandals earlier this year:

- https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...

- https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use...

It’s off putting outside of HN

crote• 1 month ago

99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on

Why? Is Claude really so much better that the additional hassle and privacy invasion is worth it? What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?

Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't everyone already be using OpenRouter & friends to avoid getting screwed over by the model-of-the-week - making a switch absolutely trivial?

deepvibrations• 1 month ago

Completely disagree that 99% of people will just do it.

A lot of people are already skeptical of the frontier labs - I moved over to Claude from OpenAI when they bent over for the US government. And I'll certainly move on again if Claude start asking for photo ID.

slashdave4• 1 month ago

It's pretty obvious this has nothing to do with Fable

vachina• 1 month ago

99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.

In a vacuum yes. But this space isn't vacuum, I'm going with path of least resistance.

zsoltkacsandi• 1 month ago

I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access

That is very well put.

cheesecakegood• 1 month ago

If they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.

cortesoft2• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.

Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.

pizzly• 1 month ago

That makes it better, paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.

InsideOutSanta• 1 month ago

I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

Definitely damaging for their IPOs

beezlewax• 1 month ago

subsidies what like space x or tesla?

marcus_holmes2• 1 month ago

shhh, the investors might hear you. If they do then the bubble pops, all those data centre projects grind to a halt, 5% of US GDP disappears, and the USA goes into a deep recession.

Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.

somenameforme• 1 month ago

And a fraction of the US market at that. Requiring ID scans and all of this nonsense to use a chatbot just added a whole layer of friction that many are going to just nope on out of and use one of the endless other services. I suppose the next step will be for the government to try to ban those other services once they mature and start booming.

lukewarm707• 1 month ago

easy IPO cashout

lyime3• 1 month ago

You underestimate how large the US market is.

ecocentrik• 1 month ago

AI was always going to be geo-politically fragmentary. As soon as we started talking about it like a utility it was clear that every country was going to be strongly limited to the resources it could develop and the infrastructure it could build out. The US and China will still be selling hardware, managing infrastructure and licensing models and yes the domestic market is massive.

byzantinegene4• 1 month ago

you understimate how large the international market is, for example, half of google's revenue is generated from international markets.

Phelinofist2• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen

...

My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models

May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)

data-ottawa2• 29 days ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking into it, it looks promising and I like that the pricing model is very upfront

throw__away7391• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to

No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.

WhyNotHugo• 1 month ago

The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.

This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.

Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.

mapontosevenths• 1 month ago

The worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner.

Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company?

There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.

metalspot2• 1 month ago

The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.

aucisson_masque2• 1 month ago

I bet that if you don't use companies that enforce these verifications, and they start to lose money, things will shift very fast.

lmohseni• 1 month ago

I’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.

varispeed2• 1 month ago

I don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product.

Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.

Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.

matheusmoreira10• 1 month ago

I wanted Fable in order to harden my C project against exploits and vulnerabilities. Anthropic downgraded me to Opus 4.8 every single time I tried to do it.

So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.

drnick1• 1 month ago

The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market

The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.

laacz• 1 month ago

Kings come and go. These types of decisions can actually kill a king. Not instantly, of course. But still.

1over1372• 1 month ago

How does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.

toofy• 1 month ago

America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge.

this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion.

just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people.

the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper.

if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?

furyofantares8• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.

dalemhurley• 1 month ago

Why, is there any evidence to support your claim?

kgutscode12• 1 month ago

GLM 5.2 is better than opus 4.8 bro what are you talking about

Aurornis6• 1 month ago

Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question.

This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

justaj2• 1 month ago

What makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?

ignoramous2• 1 month ago

This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old...

I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.

RobertDeNiro• 1 month ago

Export controls have typically been for physical goods. Don’t remember the last time it was used for an API

nutjob2• 1 month ago

You're way off the mark, and probably viewing this as an American.

If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.

When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.

baka367• 1 month ago

This decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.

Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.

hoytschermerhrn• 1 month ago

I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models. This effectively kills my usage of anthropic for anything beyond their 4.8 models.

ozozozd• 1 month ago

This is a strange plea for optimism.

Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.

What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?

sofixa6• 1 month ago

We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past.

But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.

In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?

There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.

moomin• 1 month ago

US controls on cryptography software lasted _20 years_. If there's something I'm absolutely certain of, and I'm certain of very little in the fields of AI and of politics, it's that Fable will be utterly irrelevant in 20 years time.

shevy-java5• 1 month ago

Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April.

Well, irrespective over as to whether this is the case, the blog entry from claude came yesterday, aka June:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...

So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.

jampekka• 1 month ago

Crypto export ban lasted only about 45 years. :)

epolanski2• 1 month ago

These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.

There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.

Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.

But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.

Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.

asdfsa322• 1 month ago

We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.

Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"

Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.

Citizen_Lame• 1 month ago

These are obvious lies. But whatever man, they just updated privacy policy to say they may ask you to verify age or identity.

hailwren2• 1 month ago

This strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it.

Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.

matheusmoreira10• 1 month ago

You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model

You think some people aren't "deserving" of the best models?

matheusmoreira10• 1 month ago

As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.

digitaltrees4• 1 month ago

As an American founder I am sorry for this. I think the world needs to band together to take geopolitical risk out of AI.

nozzlegear• 1 month ago

banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free

It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.

3stacks3• 1 month ago

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?

I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

windexh8er• 1 month ago

Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...

trollbridge3• 1 month ago

Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.

And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.

nextaccountic2• 1 month ago

right now the best contender is GLM 5.2, right?

either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too

danpalmer• 1 month ago

Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate

I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have.

This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.

chaitanyya• 1 month ago

I don't believe US government wanted to restrict the model use to US citizens only. The bad actors will and can find their ways around it.

They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model.

Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.

mcherm• 1 month ago

The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.

It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.

port11• 1 month ago

There’s no way I’m giving a random foreign company my ID.

I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done.

I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.

lobocinza2• 1 month ago

Worse than that. You're funding models and an ecossystem that discriminates you.

zwaps• 1 month ago

Oh no that’s terrible. They even say the data is used by the external company to train and use however.

Shit now i have to cancel my account

throwaw12• 1 month ago

I hope EU bans US models and adopts Chinese models, since US models seems to be a clear threat to EU sovereignty, while Chinese models can be deployed anywhere

maxprimes• 1 month ago

Yeah that'll be a pass for me.

labrador• 1 month ago

ID verification might be a path to allow restricted access to Fable (doesn't mention nationality yet), but I concluded I don't need Fable, which excels more at technical work, because I do therapy/recovery/lifecoach work which Opus is good at. I'm retired and need personal "executive function" type assistance.

SXX3• 1 month ago

Except its like completely useless and insane from security standpoint. Any bad actor will just pay $50 to a meth junkie to register and verify account.

Fortunatelly its all just secuiry theatre so no one cares.

photios• 1 month ago

I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D

othmanosx• 1 month ago

Just run the /insights command on your Claude and see what it gives you, you'd be shocked what it knows about you just talking to it.

blitzar2• 1 month ago

Jeez it cant remember to use uv every time it runs python (dozens of times a day) but the one time I said "at least lube it up before you shaft me" it noted my preference in its /insights.

ur-whale• 1 month ago

One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".

oceanwaves• 1 month ago

I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock

AnotherGoodName• 1 month ago

From that thread.

The OP post is misinformation. The policy page has been unchanged since April 16 (including the words Updated this week) and has to do with verifying if you're an adult if they suspect the account is used by an under 18, which we all already know Anthropic is doing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.c...

So this isn't new right?

nightshift1• 1 month ago

When i tried to upgrade from 5x to 20x a few months ago, they froze my account until i sent them a full 3d scan of my face and a photo of my id. The only way i could deny was to cancel my account. So this is nothing new for them.

surume• 1 month ago

Please God let a model or company as capable as Claude/Anthropic come along soon that doesnt require ID so that we don’t all end up as uncreative mind slaves.

gravity2060• 1 month ago

One of my frustrations with this is for those of us who allow our under-18 year old children access to our account. If we want our kids to code with ai-assist, my read of the “ban-if-under-18” means I risk my indispensable pro account by giving my kids claude code on their laptops now. Is this a correct reading?

unshavedyak• 1 month ago

I wouldn’t let anyone else use it in general because it’s an asset i don’t want to lose. As it is I now have to be careful what I use it for as I don’t want to trip any flags. Eg today I was curious how some LLM benchmarks worked and I wanted to talk through how I’d develop some, running some models locally, etc. however I don’t want to be flagged as a potential competitor and have my account revoked from Fable/etc.

It’s feeling quite similar to why I distributed out from google all those years ago. I didn’t want a hugely important centralized google account to be banned and cause friction to various aspects of my life.

The ability for LLMs to more easily catalogue user behavior and intent is going to get more interesting. Weird days. Feels like anyone could become a Facebook level metadata hoarder.

zarzavat• 1 month ago

Switch to open models and restore your sanity. GLM 5.2 is only slightly behind. Paying money but living in fear regardless is silly.

tamimio2• 1 month ago

I don’t know since when it became acceptable and normalized to provide government ID to some corporate, and your data are under the mercy of a random employee, manager, revised policy, or predator investors? No, never. I only provide my government ID to the government that I voted for, or I can hold it accountable if anything goes wrong.

dpkirchner2• 1 month ago

I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?

SXX3• 1 month ago

Not much pen testing you can do if they decide to cut you off. E.g on Linkedin it only works with NFC-enabled passports so it cryprographically signed by issuer country.

Though considering how many americans dont have passports its will be like shooting themself in a foot.

zaptheimpaler• 1 month ago

AI is weapons now. Need a gun license to buy and operate pistols (Opus), assault rifles (Fable) will be highly limited, even higher tiers of weapons will only be accessible by corporate and state-level actors - we might not even know they exist or what they're capable of. Democratization of AI is dead. Gen pop is completely asleep to all of this so its going to get locked down in the name of safety before anyone even wakes up.

zb3• 1 month ago

In the US, guns are apparently safer than Anthropic AI models :)

userbinator3• 1 month ago

Fortunately the 2nd Amendment exists.

tiahura6• 1 month ago

And allows banning fully automatic weapons and licensing.

padjo• 1 month ago

Not a chance i'll be handing my id over to Persons. So what are the alternatives for AI coding these days?

slopinthebag• 1 month ago

A combination of GLM 5.2 for deep tasks, and Deepseek 4 pro/flash for speed. Even Deepseek 4 pro is so fast you can quickly iterate by breaking down tasks into small chunks and steering it. I prefer that over the classic "here is an entire spec, chew on it for 30 mins" thing you would do with Opus/Fable.

rzerowan• 1 month ago

How does this play aout in the current realm of ID verifiation laws sweeping across most of the EU and US. As usual is using 'protect the children' : UK,AuS, FR for social media and Operating Systems while also pushing 'national security' : this current iteration. End result seems to be total end of online anonymity while the data slurpers and data brokers continue plying their trade uninterrupted.

dwa35923• 1 month ago

I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.

tiahura6• 1 month ago

Hopefully you work for a competitor.

dwa35923• 1 month ago

I actually don't.

dwa35923• 1 month ago

Are they paying Persona identities in Haiku credits? Is that why they chose them? It was only 4 months ago that company was dropped by discord.

mounz• 1 month ago

This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after

chickensong6• 1 month ago

Oh good, uploading your ID and selfie to the much-hated Persona. What could possibly go wrong?

monksy3• 1 month ago

https://www.zyphe.com/resources/blog/persona-discord-central...

chickensong6• 1 month ago

Don't worry, they take security and privacy very seriously and have reviewed and updated their procedures to ensure your data is only shared with trusted partners.

tiahura6• 1 month ago

So like the 10,000th breach where we still can’t find anyone suffering any sort of actual harm?

Seems like the old Linux FUD to me.

skywhopper• 1 month ago

It will never stop amusing me that an expired ID is invalid for verification. How does that negate my identity? Particularly my age.

dofm10• 1 month ago

Isn't it because expired IDs drop out of validation databases, fundamentally?

So an expired ID is not verifiable in the same way a fake one isn't.

134152• 1 month ago

What validation databases and where can you get access to them?

dev1ycan• 1 month ago

Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id

redbell• 1 month ago

We are rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and you might see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.

I'd like to know what capabilities/features/plans that need ID verification as it is unclear for me right now. Also, this would become a true barrier in the future if they apply this for every account regardless of the features being used.

We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguards

Since I read I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245), I, somehow, start feeling very uncomfortable with ID verification as it appears there are actually many players processing my personal data, not just Persona.

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

This is an old page that pre-dates the Fable situation. Seems people only discovered it recently though.

Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago

dom96• 1 month ago

I don't mind this, what I do mind is that there is still no way to verify my identity without giving private information to third parties. Why aren't governments building zero knowledge proof-based solutions to this?

dofm10• 1 month ago

Is exactly the question. Maybe this will actually make that happen.

(I believe some EU countries do have digital attestation tools?)

chickensong6• 1 month ago

Because governments are notoriously inept and corrupt. I think it's bound to happen eventually (though probably not ZKP), but I'm not holding my breath.

dofm10• 1 month ago

Ohhh Emm Gee, the HN singularity has arrived.

chuckling in slightly mischievous British

Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?

chickensong6• 1 month ago

Why assume any responsibility when you can just outsource and shrug/blame the 3rd-party when they get breached.

dofm10• 1 month ago

I have just read that OpenAI are also using Persona?

So maybe Persona has developed tools for this specific form of eligibility check?

bnj2• 1 month ago

We are not collecting more than we need

Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?

dofm10• 1 month ago

Issuer country is not a very good proxy for nationality, I suppose.

bnj2• 1 month ago

Wouldn't this also be true of government issued ID's? There's nothing preventing a non-US national from having a drivers license...

Maybe I just don't understand the definitions?

nailer• 1 month ago

you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone

They've been generating these with AI since 2023 (and likely earlier, but that's the first time I heard it being used in the wild).

Photo ID is a real person (your hotel maid took photos) iPhone headroll is generated to match the real photo ID with AI.

zeafoamrun• 1 month ago

Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.

aftbit• 1 month ago

How long can they retain my identity information? I didn't see an answer to that in the post - did I just miss it, or are they being purposefully obtuse?

g42gregory3• 1 month ago

I am not sure what is the purpose of this. If you are paying with a credit card, they already have your fully verified identity through the bank's KYC, fully protecting Anthropic legally.

Corporate accounts, in the US, will have full personal identification through the corresponding company's HR.

qezz• 1 month ago

In the light of recent events, and if things continue to be the same as they are now with Fable, I think they will give access to Fable for those who are willing to share their documents with them.

But that's obviously just a speculation.

SV_BubbleTime4• 1 month ago

Well… maybe the real thing isn’t the headline thing?

itake• 1 month ago

Prepaid credit cards with cash would not be linked to your identity.

jbverschoor• 1 month ago

How your data is protected

It's not

monksy3• 1 month ago

Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.

g42gregory3• 1 month ago

Here is what I think it the game is:

1. Force KYC is US LLM providers, gleefully supported by the US LLM providers.

2. Next -> now Chinese LLM providers must use KYC in the "free market" Western world.

3. But we can's allow KYC information to go to China, can we?

4. Now Western customers can not access Chinese LLM

5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.

jimmydoe2• 1 month ago

this is ridiculous.

there are tons of US providers supports Chinese models. Chinese labs give them weights, they don't give back user info in return.

miki1232117• 1 month ago

5. Chinese providers license their models to western partners, with the Chinese running training and the westerners running inference.

It's what most western companies have to do when they want to operate in China anyway, no reason why we couldn't have a reverse system.

g42gregory3• 1 month ago

I hope you're right.

kingkongjaffa• 1 month ago

Since the end is near does anyone have a claude data export flow/tool they have used?

I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.

jimmydoe2• 1 month ago

ffs do it and give me fable.

petre• 1 month ago

Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.

octagons• 1 month ago

I’ve only seen vague suggestions of what is actually being gated through this verification. Is there a more definitive explanation of what will require the verification?

Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.

_bobm• 1 month ago

I find it funny that some comments are arguing why "the innocent users have to fall victims, becoming/ being collateral damage" to this american governmental whim and thus being deprived of access to these models.

But hold on, collateral to what? Is this "our own personal jesus" access that we cannot live without or what?

People don't and cannot learn how to code or what? We don't know how to think?

I am calling their bluff. Fill your own gddam datacenters with "meaning".

Panta rei.

p0w3n3d2• 1 month ago

  A phone or a computer with a camera: you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone, or your webcam

  A blood probe might be required as usb dongle to test your blood sample. We're working on stool sampling mechanism as well.

  Your house might be monitored with one or more armed drones to prevent any tampering with your WiFi and cable connection

userbinator3• 1 month ago

This is the next "drink verification can".

p0w3n3d2• 1 month ago

TIL verification can was invented and today's gaming state was predicted 13years ago

dvduval• 1 month ago

So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM. Maybe a political candidate for the opposing party has something embarrassing there for example.

georgemcbay• 1 month ago

So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM

This should definitely be a concern for any Claude user, especially given the open corruption of the current US administration.

If that alone doesn't concern you, everyone should also remember that Anthropic has accidentally released their own source code multiple times at this point.

Why should anyone believe they are going to handle your personal data with any more care than their own?

yreg• 1 month ago

Isnt your account linked to your bank card anyway? The problem is storing the chat logs.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

That makes the need for id verification even worse. They already know who is paying

jchw• 1 month ago

lol, absolutely not.

dsign• 1 month ago

Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.

That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.

kylehotchkiss2• 1 month ago

Subpoena by ID, nice and easy

sinker2• 1 month ago

Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.

IAmGraydon• 1 month ago

Agreed, this is crazy, and is exactly why the administration did what it did. However, every frontier model will require this within months.

sinker2• 1 month ago

You're right. I want to say that openai is a viable alternative, but they're even less trustworthy.

It might be time for me to start looking into Chinese models or purchasing hardware for local llms, even if the cost amounts to 5-10k.

jerry4next3• 1 month ago

I canceled when they first labeled as a supply chain risk. Switched to codex and neverlooked back. This company will be more evil then Google at the end.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

Do you believe OpenAI won’t face the same troubles?

starik36• 1 month ago

OpenAI had the the same restrictions. Also required you to verify via Persona. I complained and at some point the restrictions were removed. Not sure if because of my complaining or if someone in our org actually verified.

https://imgur.com/ugXQ6Eb

slashdave4• 1 month ago

So... do you know why they were labeled that way?

byzantinegene4• 1 month ago

and.. how is codex any better?

zx80804• 1 month ago

Codex was bought by Musk a few days back.

originalvichy• 1 month ago

In my case, the ethical AI theatre fell apart as soon as I read about their first military contracts, specifically with the US government.

Their ethos is boiled down to ”we’ll do everything to stop AI from killing us all! However, on the path to AI world domination, we don’t mind helping with killing people here and there :)”

tgsovlerkhgsel• 1 month ago

Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.

btown• 1 month ago

Notably, though, Persona does not have access to your Claude interactions, other than your signup/verification date. They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.

atmosx• 1 month ago

They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.

And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.

appplication• 1 month ago

Maybe I’m entirely uncreative here, but if all they have is identity data and the implied data of having triggered a verification event, it feels like at best anything trained on this is really sketchy and could lead to some really messed up analysis. Like “we determined brown people trigger perform Claude queries that trigger identify verification at a rate 70% higher than white people”.

fragmede6• 1 month ago

They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure

Or they won't. They're not Facebook.

sneak4• 1 month ago

…and when they inevitably leak your government name with your facial biometrics? You can change your cc number and your phone number and your address. Your facial geometry, not so much.

llm_nerd• 1 month ago

While this seems related to recent events, this page has been there for months. They have used it when they think an account is underage.

We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633

neosat• 1 month ago

Anthropic is really on a tricky path here. When you have had runaway success due to a hit it is easy to believe that it is the natural way of things. However, that happened due to unique convergence of tech paradigm shift, the competitive landscape, and how they were positioned to capture that value through claude code.

They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'. While it's an admirable internal quality for the company to have, their treatment of their user base (developers, users) has been bordering on indifference and their stance bordering on arrogance.

As competition heats up, there is a very real chance of them shooting themselves in the foot with friction such as this (to be fair not completely in their control but also they had their share of responsibility that led to this)

Wowfunhappy• 1 month ago

They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'.

...I don't think this is, like, a choice available to Anthropic. Their idea of AI safety—in the very specific "an unaligned AI could kill everyone" sense—is Anthropic's entire reason for existence. It's how they've attracted AI researchers, which in turn is probably why they have the best models right now. (I really do think they have the best models, although I can't prove it because LLM benchmarks don't work. They're certainly very good.)

I have no idea what the top executives truly believe, but regardless of whether their messaging is sincere, it's likely for their employees as much as the rest of us.

BoredPositron• 1 month ago

It's annoying but ok in general to verify age of your users. The problem for me is mainly how and what vendor they use. They picked the worst possibilities.

Alien1Being• 1 month ago

This is a big win for LLMs from China and to a much lesser extent from Europe.

I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.

jasonvorhe• 1 month ago

Not gonna happen. I'll just just more of the Chinese models then. Digital I'd is a clear no from me.

SXX3• 1 month ago

Come on guys, just give your ID, passport data and photo (since it scans NFC) to Persona. After all Peter Thiel is the most trustworthy supplier of tech in US used to kill people using drones with AI including face recognition.

Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?

kylehotchkiss2• 1 month ago

On the bright side maybe less people will use AI as a therapist if every thought they dump into it is now associated to their ID and home address

airhangerf153• 23 days ago

It's really not a huge jump for your prompts to lead to an arrest for wrong think with this model. Europe may even require it if someone asks about the 6 million.

SilverElfin• 1 month ago

Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.

What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.

AI is all about information and therefore about speech. If you need to identify yourself to access information or ask questions, it undermines freedom. Anthropic is on the wrong side of history.

sebiw• 1 month ago

hmate9• 1 month ago

Not defending this, and it's far from ideal, but also credit card details were already pretty much confirming identities already.

fithisux• 1 month ago

The coding capabilities they offer, are their own.

This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.

We knew that from the start.

phreack• 1 month ago

Makes one ponder how there really is no moat. If this rolls out as implied, it is immediately easy to switch providers, and I will.

nickandbro• 1 month ago

I understand how this can be incredibly frustrating to non-US users or people who would like to remain anonymous. But from an enforcement perspective makes sense. If someone is able to leverage a jail break to break into a classified system, the government needs to easily be able to track down who that person is.

spiffistan• 1 month ago

You can make that silly argument to justify almost any government overreach

dgellow6• 1 month ago

They already have an identity based on payment method…

ares623• 1 month ago

Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI.

"Hey, maybe social media shouldn't be made available to children. Let's add some age checks maybe?" "Reee noo that's invasion of privacy it's a slippery slope"

"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"

fragmede6• 1 month ago

Who says that's perfectly reasonable? The first thing to ask any new LLM is how do you make cocaine, to figure out how nerfed it is.

noiv• 1 month ago

Interestingly Persona offers an attribution process (“verified” or “not verified”) and no data is held. Why does Anthropic want a selfie?

AtNightWeCode• 1 month ago

Why use Persona? Most countries have real services for identifying users. Same services that are used when you pay online or do your taxes. At the end it does not really matter I guess. American cloud services are compromised and can no longer be trusted.

sph• 1 month ago

How does it work in business settings? Is your employer going to send your ID information to Claude?

fizlebit• 1 month ago

How is it going to work for corporate customers. What if one us employee writes claude output into a ticket, can that be read by a non us citizen employee? What about paraphrased?

aucisson_masque2• 1 month ago

Alright, I'm off Claude.

That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.

How could they do that ?

134152• 1 month ago

I'm glad I don't use Claude.

maccard• 1 month ago

So apparently the UK and Europe are sleepwalking into an identity collection en masse by the state and yet…

giancarlostoro• 1 month ago

I am reminded of the time Discords support desk was compromised where hackers had access to the data of anyone who ever had to give their support channels their ID. Are we sure we trust this third party to not be compromised? Is Anthropic allowing non-US citizens access to this data? Are they in countries where they could be bribed over access to this data much like in Discords case?

I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.

yuzuquat• 1 month ago

I'm curious how multiple accounts come into play here. Does anyone know?

Aurornis6• 1 month ago

This page has been up since April: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...

I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.

You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.

rabbitlord• 1 month ago

nice to know it!!!

waterTanuki• 1 month ago

Did anthropic bar the use of any of their models behind an ID process back in April?

vopi• 1 month ago

The answer seems to be yes [0]. Although I think it's important to state The Web Archive link proves that the recent Fable banning was not the catalyst for the page being linked.

Will Fable be back behind an ID verification step? I wouldn't be shocked if that happened. However, this specific support page and the ID veridiction process is not new. It is currently enforce.

It appears (but I can't be certain and don't think it's in bad faith) that many people are under the assumption that this is a result of the Fable banning. As a datapoint, I did some form of KYC verification to use OpenAI's cybersecurity platform a few weeks ago.

To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_iv...

Edit: truthbe above pointed out there was a privacy policy change.

truthbe3• 1 month ago

Anthropic’s -updated- privacy policy allows age and identity checks for Claude consumer users starting July 8th.

Aurornis6• 1 month ago

Incorrect. The policy already allowed age and identity checks. You can find cases of people being flagged for ID checks across social media like Reddit, or even in this thread on Hacker News. This is not new.

The updates were for the appeals process.

rubicon33• 1 month ago

Thanks. I went looking for how to actually verify myself as I would love to get access to Fable again. This post confirmed it, it's not relate to Fable at all and has been around. Thanks.

codehotter• 1 month ago

The identity verification support page says 'updated this week' but that is just an update to the appeals process. https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/

There was, however, also a change to the privacy policy, effective July 8, 2026. See https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o... It now says:

"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."

The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.

An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858

LauraMedia• 1 month ago

At least I (living in the EU) received an email at work on the 18th that had this section under "What has changed":

2. Verification Data. As part of our efforts to ensure the security of our services, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. We have described what information we collect and how we collect it.

userbinator3• 1 month ago

I wonder how good AI now is at generating plausible-looking identity documents, photos, and videos of a virtual identity...

lofaszvanitt• 1 month ago

Ridiculous theatre.

nedt• 1 month ago

At the very least I would expect them to support eID for everyone who can and doesn't want their 3rd party. Also much better than take a video of plastic card.

Aeolun2• 1 month ago

Oh, yes, they’ll only have my passport and selfie. I’m sure they couldn’t do anything with those.

Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.

How is it always the same company doing the verification too?

throwatdem12311• 1 month ago

Anthropic: we don’t want to be used for mass surveillance

Also Anthropic:

andxor• 1 month ago

This page has existed since way before the current Fable controversy.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858

_heimdall2• 1 month ago

Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes

I'm always curious about these stipulations. Its not like Anthropic would have a choice here what the legal demands are, but I don't see a commitment to make all requests as public as they legally can.

If the government were to say export controls mean you must share every identity verification attempt with us, it may be a long drawn out battle if Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.

Havoc• 1 month ago

Verification data stays between you, Persona

The company that already had a data breach incident & has ties to palantir. Also used by OpenAI to ensure you can't escape it.

Now we just need to tie this in with Sam's eyeball scanning tech for maximum dystopia vibes

TalkingCodeMonk• 1 month ago

Persona is also a core provider in jurisdications implementing ID laws for social media and other web services.

Considering the ties to Palantir and America's mass surveillance apparatus, one could even argue that a primary goal of the admin could be to use the USA's current AI lead to accelerate the adoption of web ID laws, and global push to deanonymize all web traffic.

yieldcrv• 1 month ago

I bet z.ai doesn’t even respond to US subpoenas

claudecheers• 1 month ago

Currently going through all my claude web chats and building conversation logs and downloading all my files as well as using the export function. Getting throttled pretty hard now. I have a max20 plan and will be canceling it at the end of my billing cycle. What disappointing news! I was all in until this identity verification requirement. I guess I will have to try out deepseek now.

neilv• 1 month ago

I want Anthropic to be the good guys.

I think Anthropic should explain why they're doing this particular partnership.

self_awareness• 1 month ago

Prepare for hard landing in 3... 2... 1...

micromacrofoot• 1 month ago

No I will not

winterec• 1 month ago

My email address in Claude contains my full name. I pay it with a bank card and the bank already verified my full identity.

Realistically this is a "who cares" for me. It represents very little if any incremental privacy loss.

The only question left is which countries will have access or if it will be USA only.

epsteingpt• 1 month ago

all the paid spies in the comments being like... 'f this is bad for the U.S., the U.S. is doing something terrible'

cryptonector2• 1 month ago

Person is terrible. The U.S. itself should provide this service.

zx80804• 1 month ago

Shut up and take my money. Joeks aside, no ID for you. My name is on my bank card and my bank has KYCed me already.

baddash• 1 month ago

i think claude is going to become the AI of the US government/public sector. if it isn't already

Frannky• 1 month ago

So they will be able to know how each person thinks, block capabilities they want to block, boycott what they want to boycott, and influence perspective on reality.

Fortunately they are Anthropic and so as the name tells, they will care about humans. And so we can trust them they won't try to push agendas that require constant propaganda to be accepted, since it never happened before right?

De platforming, debanking, misinformation, hate speech, anyone?

gandalfgreybeer• 1 month ago

Restricting access to US-only when the training dataset is from data of people around the world and data centers are not all US-only is something that's making me consider not supporting Anthropic.

qilo• 1 month ago

Hold on a second... didn't you literally hand over a verified phone number when you signed up? Please tell me you used a burner SIM for that!

DaSHacka• 1 month ago

Of course, how else would I cycle between free accounts when my usage limit is up

StefanBatory• 1 month ago

Depending on countries, there is no such thing as a burner SIM card.

XiS• 1 month ago

`Persona is contractually limited in how they can use your data: only to provide and support verification and to improve their ability to prevent fraud.`

Right.... So training a better facial recognition model improves their ability to prevent fraud?

zx80804• 1 month ago

Sure. And also exchanging the data (sharing it) with partners:

Persona ... cross-references your information against trusted third-party databases.

pixlmint• 1 month ago

I cancelled my claude pro a couple weeks back. Had some doubts over it, but not anymore

bandrami• 1 month ago

Tom Sawyer at one point was painting a fence and trying to get people to help him and nobody would. Until he started saying "Oh I don't know, I'm not sure if I can let you help out".

DarkmSparks• 1 month ago

Didnt claude recently post its entire codebase online?

Seems like it upgraded to doxxing its entire userbase.

hhh• 1 month ago

Did everyone forget that you have to do this for OpenAI since GPT-4?

canbus• 1 month ago

Why is the world going in this direction? I don’t want to give my biometric data to everyone. I can’t change it if it gets breached or sold on…

globular-toast• 1 month ago

Now the question is, are people addicted enough already to do whatever it takes to continue getting the hit?

rw2• 1 month ago

This is a good thing:

A. This brings responsibilities on using these super powerful models like fable and mythos.

B. Distillation attacks can be avoided as someone who does it can be perma banned

C. Brings value to having an American passport, AI benefits all the world equally but it's built on American talent and capital. There should be some value to people who are not shareholders.

BatteryMountain• 1 month ago

I will never ever give Persona my ID.

wewewedxfgdf• 1 month ago

> We only use your verification data to confirm who you are and not for any other purposes.

We use "who you are" mainly for banning you from the system for life, so you'll never be able to AI program again and will have to leave the industry because some arbitrary decision by some grunt at Anthropic decided you were in breach of something, with no path for review or justice.

See, it's all fine!

shevy-java5• 1 month ago

Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.

As said - YOU have become their product. I call it slavery.

Anyone still wondering who really is pushing for mandatory age sniffing on computers? We are seeing the whole picture slowly now. AI is a huge scam - it is all against humans.

numpad0• 1 month ago

Persona is a third party identity verification company backed by Peter Thiel. The announcement comes months after Discord dropped Persona as an age verification vendor following significant user backlash and a reported data exposure incident in February 2026.

So, in the end, it was just another mass ID grab by Persona? This also doesn't look like how EAR stuffs were handled.

GL26• 1 month ago

If models start only being available for a certain class of citizens of x,y,z countries, there will be "smart hackers" selling out their token usage for twice the price or something (a litteral black market for tokens).

mhalle• 1 month ago

The ID verification is also being used to enforce Claude's 18+ age restriction.

It seems there is no way for a high school student to use Claude for any purpose, including as part of a supervised project or class.

codedokode• 1 month ago

What about buying API access through intermediaries like OpenRouter? Also, will the people passing verification be added to a openaiwatchlist DB?

koryanders• 1 month ago

Time to move to locally hosted open source models - only if the thinking models could perform well locally

papa_pandora• 1 month ago

this will finally kickstart the self hosted revolution in full force. Because I for sure af ain't giving my id to some AI company and have them profile me into oblivion.

storus• 1 month ago

This just follows the usual tech trend that when something gets finally good enough, an unskippable package deal appears as the only way to use it.

Identity verification on Claude

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