Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.
Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.
Then, Chase knows you've verified your ID somewhere, the relay knows that some Chase user verified themselves at Pornhub, and Pornhub knows that the user is over 18, without knowing their identity or what bank they're using.
You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. The latter is more secure but more complex, the former is much simpler and openness friendly.
I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”.
Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”
Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.
Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws
/regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.
I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.
Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.
If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most.
People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.
Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.
The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.
So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.
Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.
That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.
For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.
> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
They certainly can't infer my full name and address from what I've used Claude for in the past, but if I'm forced to hand over
my ID and I do, then they would.
The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.
I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.
But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.
Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:
If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero.
Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong.
Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that.
Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.
Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology.
But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways.
Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a computing class the primary output isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever. No newspapers. No television. No radio. No internet.
2. You're a child under the age of six.
3. You're an LLM.
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
I agree about corporations. But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws? They help ensure that the parents aren’t bypassed.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
> But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws?
Yes, but merely on principle. I think alcohol and tobacco should be straight up banned unconditionally. Society resists this, so they banned them for children instead and called it a day.
I don't accept these ineffectual political concessions. If a thing is bad for children, then it's in all likelihood just as bad for the adults as well. So go all the way and ban it for everybody, not just children. Do it right, don't come up with these half measures that dehumanize children as a side effect.
There is a trade-off between freedom and keeping people safe, and there is an argument for some level of personal responsibility. I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
I also disagree with the dehumanization argument. Yes, the concrete age limits are a bit arbitrary, and actual maturity depends on the individual and is a spectrum, but regulations necessarily have to come with some level of pigeonholing. The fact that you may have to show your ID when buying alcohol isn’t dehumanizing.
Right, but in this case, exposure is a work requirement, which is a bit different. While an employer isn't going to require tobacco use, work involving asbestos exposure is still a thing (removal perhaps), and an employer knowingly or negligently requiring work activity without both risk disclosure and supply of proper safety equipment would face legal action.
Hence, if mandatory workplace use of AI inflicts harm, then I could imagine things playing out similarly. The damage slowly accumulates, may or may not be noticed in time, becomes difficult to pin down on a past employer, and when you finally realize you need to sue for damages, both the employer responsible and the system are rigged to drag out the process until you're hopefully old and dead before you have a chance to win your case.
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
I think you need to explain the solution you're thinking of in detail.
"an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information." is no different to "turn on age lock?" that you see on website now. It requires the parent to be present, engaged and 1 step ahead of their kids, and if we could depend on that, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I think the concern is a forced bit of functionality in all operating systems. It would quickly lead to a "and you need a license to sell your device so we can check that it can't bypass mandatory chuld-safety guards". Just like how some politicians are proposing mandatory licensing for releasing any AI model.
I suspect that communicating a flag value of boolean true/false that "this computer is in use by a minor" from the operating system (via browser or app) to a remote SaaS service like something run by Anthropic will be seen as insufficient by the SaaS, so they'll necessitate ID-scan/live-selfie verification anyways.
Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.
That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.
Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.
An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.
Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.
Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.
Whenever I see people say "oh we should just get the ISPs to block it!" I wonder if they work at any ISP, or are just an end-user consumer of their services... As someone who does work in the ISP/telecom infrastructure sector my first reaction is hell no. I do not want US/Canadian ISPs to go down the path of what has happened with, for instance, Spanish ISPs DNS-blocking football related things as a result of court orders.
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.
I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.
Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.
It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.
Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.
The whole thing is pointless.
Bank? So now you know what bank they use?
This is why you have a relay in the middle.
Then, Chase knows you've verified your ID somewhere, the relay knows that some Chase user verified themselves at Pornhub, and Pornhub knows that the user is over 18, without knowing their identity or what bank they're using.
You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. The latter is more secure but more complex, the former is much simpler and openness friendly.
I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”.
Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”
> where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"
This person? There's your PII right there. The ad seller's dream.
I can't figure out if you're joking or not.
Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.
Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws /regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.
And really the only upside to minor accounts is building loyalty, which is not nothing but also not the same as a paying customer.
Easy to see how Anthropic could decide it’s not with the exposure to liability and regulatory actions.
I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.
Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.
If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)
>Damn, we hardly know who our users are
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.
Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most.
People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.
Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.
Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.
I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.
The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.
So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.
And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.
> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
I doubt that this statement is true.
If it wasn't true before, it'll certainly appear to be true to Anthropic after this change, regardless if it's actually true or not in practice.
Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
Some people are just better pattern matchers
That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
there is no smoke without fire
“Suspicion is the same as fact”
This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.
That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.
For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.
> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p
*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
> I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything
You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.
You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.
They certainly can't infer my full name and address from what I've used Claude for in the past, but if I'm forced to hand over my ID and I do, then they would.
Haven't they reported "anonymous" users before to the police?
I don't know, how is that relevant to them asking for IDs now and also still not yet knowing my full name and/or address?
Can you source this? Seems believable but I haven’t heard it before.
Why would they need to do ID checks then?
Liability
> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever
You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.
The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
> if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent
I know this isn't what you meant, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a parent consenting: "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data"
As to your actual point, yes, I assume they are trying to reduce liability, especially if they're gearing up to an IPO.
Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.
Yeah I don’t think Anthropic is particularly interested in tracking individuals in the same way that companies like Facebook and Google are.
I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.
But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.
Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.
I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.
Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.
Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors
If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero.
Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong.
Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that.
Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.
Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology.
But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways.
Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
> Is AI bad for mental health?
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a computing class the primary output isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
I agree with your assertions, but…
AI companies have the same fear of underage users that tobacco companies of underage smokers.
> reasonable usage for school age children
Comical to believe that any of these companies care. They are out to MAKE MONEY. That’s the only believable motivation for what the do.
> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.> harmful effects of AI on minors
Which is dwarfed by the harmful effects of social media (engagement farming).
Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I think the articles you are talking about haven’t even been interesting enough to click on.
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.
> Is AI bad for mental health?
Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.
Is AI bad for mental health?
lol
If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
No, capitalism must be fed.
Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.
Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children.
Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.
And parents are assumed to be responsible for their own children, not governments or corporations.
I agree about corporations. But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws? They help ensure that the parents aren’t bypassed.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
> But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws?
Yes, but merely on principle. I think alcohol and tobacco should be straight up banned unconditionally. Society resists this, so they banned them for children instead and called it a day.
I don't accept these ineffectual political concessions. If a thing is bad for children, then it's in all likelihood just as bad for the adults as well. So go all the way and ban it for everybody, not just children. Do it right, don't come up with these half measures that dehumanize children as a side effect.
There is a trade-off between freedom and keeping people safe, and there is an argument for some level of personal responsibility. I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
I also disagree with the dehumanization argument. Yes, the concrete age limits are a bit arbitrary, and actual maturity depends on the individual and is a spectrum, but regulations necessarily have to come with some level of pigeonholing. The fact that you may have to show your ID when buying alcohol isn’t dehumanizing.
> I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
I'm sure teenagers feel the same way.
In fact, a 17-year-old is clueless while a person one year older isn't
Right, but in this case, exposure is a work requirement, which is a bit different. While an employer isn't going to require tobacco use, work involving asbestos exposure is still a thing (removal perhaps), and an employer knowingly or negligently requiring work activity without both risk disclosure and supply of proper safety equipment would face legal action.
Hence, if mandatory workplace use of AI inflicts harm, then I could imagine things playing out similarly. The damage slowly accumulates, may or may not be noticed in time, becomes difficult to pin down on a past employer, and when you finally realize you need to sue for damages, both the employer responsible and the system are rigged to drag out the process until you're hopefully old and dead before you have a chance to win your case.
...oh.
brains develop with age, generally
That doesn't nullify a person's ability to decide for themselves.
> Mandatory warnings like for tobacco
lol that’ll work
The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?
So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.
I agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...
"May 18, 2026" is right there next to the title. Nothing changed.
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.
Vibecoding is harmful for kids, especially when they grow up.
Well done Claude, will use Chinese models instead!
And i won't give you my ID card.
If this rolls out, does it mean they'll lift the ban on 'M for Mature' content?
I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
I think you need to explain the solution you're thinking of in detail.
"an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information." is no different to "turn on age lock?" that you see on website now. It requires the parent to be present, engaged and 1 step ahead of their kids, and if we could depend on that, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I think the concern is a forced bit of functionality in all operating systems. It would quickly lead to a "and you need a license to sell your device so we can check that it can't bypass mandatory chuld-safety guards". Just like how some politicians are proposing mandatory licensing for releasing any AI model.
I suspect that communicating a flag value of boolean true/false that "this computer is in use by a minor" from the operating system (via browser or app) to a remote SaaS service like something run by Anthropic will be seen as insufficient by the SaaS, so they'll necessitate ID-scan/live-selfie verification anyways.
Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.
That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.
Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.
An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.
Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.
Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.
Whenever I see people say "oh we should just get the ISPs to block it!" I wonder if they work at any ISP, or are just an end-user consumer of their services... As someone who does work in the ISP/telecom infrastructure sector my first reaction is hell no. I do not want US/Canadian ISPs to go down the path of what has happened with, for instance, Spanish ISPs DNS-blocking football related things as a result of court orders.
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.
I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated
Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?
I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.
Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.
And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.
The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
we are all incomplete human beings with limited agency. protecting minors us about understanding stages of development.
The larger the list of thing minors cannot do, the more they will resent the constraints.
I don't want or need governments and corporations to "understand" my development. I'll take care of that myself, thanks.
Children absolutely should have less agency than adults.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
This level of psychosis makes me wonder if adults should be banned from using AI as well.
The future I dread is one where kids don't learn and just defer everything to AI. That puts so much power into the hands of the AI companies.
who is "they"? and why is this a desirable outcome exactly?
that's retarded
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
And TikTok is not available for minors in Poland yet a know 11y old who publish there so yeah, good to pretend
and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.
Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.
This should have “May 2026” in the title. I don’t recall discussion at the time but surely there was a lot?
if claude ask me verification i will drop using it thats it
This isn't recent, right?
The date on the help article is May 18, 2026.
>You’ll have the option to verify your age using Yoti, a third-party age verification platform.
Thank goodness that there are others on the frontier.
Interesting that they’ve switched from Persona to Yoti. But what a strange move, with no justification in the article!!
It’s quite amazing that in a support doc for normies, they’re literally linking to https://developers.yoti.com/identity-verification/supported-... for supported IDs which opens with
Can’t spend $10 to set up a Claude workflow to sync relevant parts of that page to a first party doc page?What was the justification for using Persona in the first place, if this is so important to know and care about?
I think getting personal data collection out of the Thielverse is anything but a strange move
Sounds like irresponsible move: https://ppc.land/spain-fines-yoti-eu950-000-over-biometric-d...
It's really a head to head race between these two companies. Which one is more disgusting etc?
Get off my load-bearing lawn!
But why?
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
Health.
The health of e.g. Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.
Since Epstein is gone, the ruling class have become obsessed with collecting photos of children and identifying devices they use. Strange that.
Surely this is the opposite? Collecting photos of adults to prove that they can use the service
Yet this move makes it harder for Anthropic to do that.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
This is from May of this year?
Since May?
This is dated May 2026...
What will our outsourcers use now?
Everyone shares their all kinds of data with ai companies. Privacy is dead anyway
(May)
It’s a paid Anslopic post like the others they post every 30m on this shit website.
Never using Claude just to spite the ad campaign
the same way social networks are not available for < 13
DeepSeek is the BEST model for the money. Why people still waste money on Claude is beyond me.
> May 19, 2026
Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
I barely am using my Claude subscription anymore anyhow. If they make me ID for it I'll simply cancel and use an open model.
Ah yes, the usual drop down where we need to confirm we are above 18.
Think of the children, won't you?
Anyone else sick of these Claude articles???
We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.
Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???
Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.
Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!
Thanks
Yeah it’s out of control
Do they even know what it is?
Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
Literal retard, do not reproduce