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...
> 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.
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.
> The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework.
I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer:
"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"
Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
While OpenAI and Anthropic have not provided any useful information for a long time, there still are some research publications from a few US companies, e.g. NVIDIA about its Nemotron models, or Google and IBM about their small LLMs.
In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
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.
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
> 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”.
This is really splitting hairs; the comment you replied to didn't even mention physical space. Yes, a lot of companies could physically run their cables next to each other, but at some point the roads have to actually work, and not be demolished every time a firm enters or leaves the market.
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
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.
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.
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'
> 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.
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.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
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.
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years 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
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
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’?
This is probably the dumbest possible way to do it. Just buy tokens through open router and you could run it all month 24/7 at 100tps for practically nothing. There are tons of ways to pay for things without giving your personal information.
$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.
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.
I don't know. Even the frontier models do dumb things sometimes. Being able to iterate (and iterate quickly) is really important. If you get 1 try a day, you're probably back to it being better to just code by hand. Also, you're going to get absolutely outpaced by anyone who uses AI that goes faster.
So maybe for a hobby project this is fine, but for something you have to take to market and compete with... I think it'd be a really rough sell.
EDIT: also, just to be clear: if there was a practical path to using local AI, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I hope it gets to the point that it's better to use local than paying someone $200/mo. But right now, that $200/mo is the clear best option. I get making compromises for ideology but the compromises are too big for me right now.
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.
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!
That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
> That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
They already reversed course on that decision a couple of days later. Trivial to find a source, but Fable is also rather notably not available to the public right now, so it's not actually a relevant threat.
excuse me but, is this trivial source you're referring to the url included in the post you're responding to, or did they reverse back to the original intent of keeping refusals quiet?
That's a decent moderation, shadowban is a totally different thing. AFAIK, your karma is enough to vouch that Flagged topics or comments and return that piece into a regular displaying.
Reddit is the only platform that actually tells you that you are shadowbanned, so at least they are upfront about it, but their appeal system sucks. My friend just appealed every day for just over 600 days and finally got their account un-shadowbanned.
No, they have fully banned and shadowbanned. If you are shadowbanned you can login and check the appeals page but your posts and comments will no longer be visible. If you are fully banned you cannot log in.
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.
An empty account and an account with a year of history have very different weights in this - most people already have an account tied to their legal name, paid for with a credit card in that same legal name. Throw in some geo-location, browser fingerprinting, etc. to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name.
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.
It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.
If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am.
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
Fun fact, if you're celebrity you get a special customer support phone number at most major corporations EG Apple because "Hi I'm Taylor Swift" gets tried a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anthropic is no better if the yardstick is complaints about these topics on reddit. The main thing Anthropic seems to add above and beyond OpenAI is overbilling (that also gets the talk-to-the-hand treatment).
Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the
mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
> Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Agreed, Anthropic have been lobbying in favor of government regulation for a while now, and there is no indication that they are not getting exactly what they wanted. Maybe it helps to push any liability onto the government rather than themselves, and certainly let's them try to hand wash from any bad outcomes.
I recall a Dario interview from a few years ago talking about security in terms of protecting their model weights and as I remember even back then they had hired ex. government security officials ... I would imagine they know exactly what to tell the government to make the "negotiation" go the way they want to. Unrelated to the current conversation, but one detail of that Dario interview I recall was mention that there is an assumption that in any organization over a given size trying to protect tech from foreign governments, there 100% will be spies on your staff, and you need to plan accordingly.
Currently they are the ones who are publishing stuff in the open. The American discourse is to close this market.
I'm not Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.
If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.
If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.
China is a much more collectivist culture. They’re willing to burn money and move in big strides IF it can get them (the country) to their goals. That’s why we consistently see that china is able to move much faster in new industries as opposed to the US.
There’s a lot of individual actors in china, just like the US, but as a whole they take a “country” approach.
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 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).
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
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.
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)
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.
Deepseek v4 pro or GLM 5.2 might be a good start. Bijan Bowen from youtube makes some excellent LLM reviews, I'll be watching even more intently from now on. All I really need is a model which is as good as Opus 4.5 was, so this transition should be fine. Thinking of switching too?
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.
That's the reason I don't have an id.me account to check my IRS account. I just use their guest login to play my tax bill quarterly. Not sure how I will pay my taxes once they nix that.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
To be clear, Wise (previously "Transfer Wise", symbol `WISE` on the LSE) is not a bank. Wise is a Money Services Business in the US; in the UK, they are an Electronic Money (e-money) Institution. When they are holding your money, they use the services of one or more actual banks.
So, I'd be careful calling Wise a "UK bank", as that gives the wrong impression.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s especially frustrating with Anthropic because we’ve known about issues with Persona for a while now, with discord. But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy. Just go with the vendor whose name you know.
Anthropic could have EASILY made an in-house solution with < 100 employees. But no, they have to make the same mistakes that behemoths like IBM and Oracle make. Y’all haven’t even IPO’d yet and we’re already entering the “sleepwalk to your grave” phase of the corporate cycle.
In-house would almost certainly mean future prosecution by the US. Using a company connected to Palantir means any employee of the US government that wants to keep their job won't ask questions.
America passes many laws but doesn't enforce the majority of them and allows people to grow largely unencumbered unless their initiatives threaten established players or the system itself.
The Dissident: If you are vocal about the system, you get locked out at every opportunity from the things you depend on to sustain yourself and communicate (social media, housing and banking).
Red Ocean: If you try to compete in a red ocean and don't give a cut to the players in that space you're shut down with frivolous lawsuits for example by buried by frivolous patent or copyright claims, liability lawsuits, and licensure requirements.
Blue Ocean: If you are a compliant person and grow in a blue ocean, once you are big enough to where you can't realistically back down, you are threatened with prison time and sanctions unless you are onboard with the government's actual agenda and its preferred partners.
Secret Societies: Above a certain point you are expected to compromise yourself with blackmail to grow even further and become a part of the brotherhood that actually runs the government agenda.
I'm just a petty conspiracy theorist, but my assumption is their use of Persona was part of "the deal" they've been encouraged to make, and what you're seeing is a company being brought to heel.
The funny thing. I've talked to normies about this. Frequently their response is "good to solves <bad thing>" But they never seem to wrap their head arround this is a tax on non-violators. Using identity verification to stop underage people from seeing porn is never realized that people that are above 18 are put at risk over this, or how it could be extended to now "adult"/"community decided 'obscene' materials" (that's what adult content is) is now restricted. (Which can include medical abortion information, disucssions arround gender, political campaigns that are unpopular, etc)
Many of the people that talk about the “massive dragnet swirling around” are posting all their details to social media and checking in on their Ring cameras, and they’re also volunteering for the persona uploads.
> 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.
If it's your customers' data you can use E2EE. If you need to read it, it is probably cheapest to keep everything on EU infrastructure to avoid paying repeat egress costs.
You might also consider shipping software-as-software, which doesn't need cloud resources, and the data can only be searched one customer at a time.
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.
If you think the field you are working in is more dangerous and important to the future of national security than i.e. nuclear energy and nuclear bombs you should really not just shut up and act like a cold blooded capitalist.
It feels like people here are not able to separate their personal dislike of the effective altruist types from a real debate on how big the stakes of AI are.
It’s tough to separate with them because “for the greater good” and “saving people from themselves” has historically not gone over well, especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism.
> especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism
This is what I don’t really get about the AI discourse… I don’t have any reason to think this is all a veneer over capitalism. We don’t know what goes on in their head but the track record of the cofounders of Anthropic is quite honest so it feels like a conspiracy theory to suggest they are purposefully getting themselves nationalized when the simplest answer is that there is real documented concern on AI safety risk
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.
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"
How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.
I normally run away from these ID checks. It’s just a matter of time until lone of these databases with everyone passports and videos get hacked. And vibe coding only makes it more likely.
I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
My understanding was that until they can make sure it cannot be weaponized against the US, only US citizens will be allowed to use it.
(Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)
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.
Honestly just give it time. This stuff moves so fast next month the conversation will be different. For folks who don’t like the ID privacy issues, use Deepseek et al and it should be able to get the job done even if the experience takes a bit more wrangling.
The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.
Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.
GLM 5.2 is far better than deepseek V4. Seriously feels like I’m talking to a Claude model. Also burns tokens like one, so there is that. Deepseek is unbeatable on price/quality.
Using even double the total tokens and taking, what, 2-3x the time?, still seems worth it if prices are 5x+ cheaper (which OpenRouter [1] claims is the case).
On NeuralWatt for my personal projects at home (not affiliated, just a happy customer), I get so much more mileage out of GLM than I get out of Claude at work, specifically because it's priced as a hammer I can pound any nail-shaped-object with, not a delicacy I need to carefully budget-analyze to try to figure out if it's worth burning my monthly spend limits on this task.
Yes and no. The hot moment I tried Fable that thing gave reviews so good I was already considering automation to cut a review for every PR in the company. Its coding abilities though were not that good.
After 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 in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
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.
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.
The Peter Thiel connection is especially toxic for a lot of people outside the US. Whether it's substantive or just optics doesn't make a huge difference.
> 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?
Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.
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.
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.
You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.
> 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.
I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
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.
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.
> 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? :)
> 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.
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.
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.
No. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Yes, those tools are to collect a real-time selfie and photo of your government-issued ID, store it insecurely, feed it into some other 3rd-party networks to profile you, and share with their trusted partners for reasons.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)”
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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)
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB RAM + oMLX|LM Studio|Llama.cpp|etc. + Opencode|etc. + Models from DeepSeek|Qwen|Google. There are alternatives to centralized, cloud-based LLMs!
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
xmstan | 10 hours 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...
stingraycharles | 9 hours ago
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.
fjsoxjdnwk | 9 hours ago
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.
HarHarVeryFunny | 8 hours ago
Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework.
I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer:
"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1
Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
adrian_b | 4 hours ago
slim | 9 hours ago
cyanydeez | 8 hours ago
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
inigyou | 9 hours ago
bitmasher9 | 9 hours ago
It’s not entirely dissimilar.
jjfoooo4 | 4 hours ago
coldtea | 4 hours ago
hdndjsbbs | 9 hours ago
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.
gentooflux | 9 hours ago
everforward | 8 hours ago
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”.
breezybottom | 2 hours ago
bko | 9 hours ago
thinkingtoilet | 9 hours ago
slim | 9 hours ago
halJordan | 9 hours ago
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.
epolanski | 8 hours ago
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.
cyanydeez | 8 hours ago
nicce | 4 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
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.
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
usernamed7 | 10 hours ago
forgetfreeman | 9 hours ago
jckahn | 9 hours ago
forgetfreeman | 8 hours ago
baq | 9 hours ago
inigyou | 9 hours ago
forgetfreeman | 9 hours ago
baq | 7 hours ago
forgetfreeman | 5 hours ago
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
baq | an hour ago
fragmede | an hour ago
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
nunez | 6 hours ago
preg_match | 3 hours ago
i2km | 9 hours ago
usernamed7 | 8 hours ago
forgetfreeman | 8 hours ago
usernamed7 | 4 hours ago
Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
forgetfreeman | 3 hours ago
Still feeling chippy over there I see.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
selfhoster11 | 2 hours ago
baq | 9 hours ago
polski-g | 9 hours ago
baq | 7 hours ago
fractorial | 8 hours ago
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?
dakolli | 7 hours ago
greenavocado | 2 hours ago
A decent deal but Flash is quite dumb and you still have to pay for output tokens
verdverm | 8 hours ago
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.
dgellow | 7 hours ago
adrian_b | 4 hours ago
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.
QuiEgo | 3 hours ago
So maybe for a hobby project this is fine, but for something you have to take to market and compete with... I think it'd be a really rough sell.
EDIT: also, just to be clear: if there was a practical path to using local AI, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I hope it gets to the point that it's better to use local than paying someone $200/mo. But right now, that $200/mo is the clear best option. I get making compromises for ideology but the compromises are too big for me right now.
jijji | an hour ago
[0] https://ollama.com/library/glm-5.2
nairboon | 9 hours ago
JimDabell | 9 hours ago
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...
inigyou | 9 hours ago
tartoran | 9 hours ago
stingraycharles | 9 hours ago
0123456789ABCDE | 9 hours ago
https://xcancel.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2064949876463645026
stingraycharles | 9 hours ago
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
0123456789ABCDE | 6 hours ago
i disagree, but it seems clear, from how you put it, that there's no point explaining the why
mlyle | 4 hours ago
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
preg_match | 3 hours ago
1. Anthropic certainly has the ability.
2. They’re willing to use it silently.
anamexis | 2 hours ago
handoflixue | 7 hours ago
0123456789ABCDE | 7 hours ago
shevy-java | 9 hours ago
Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
inigyou | 8 hours ago
eimrine | 3 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
qingcharles | 8 hours ago
inigyou | 8 hours ago
qingcharles | 5 hours ago
mafuy | 3 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
handoflixue | 7 hours ago
If you're willing to wait a couple years, I dare say a few services might have changed their minds by then, so it's too early to judge.
qingcharles | 5 hours ago
eli | 4 hours ago
qingcharles | 4 hours ago
In Reddit's case it means you can continue to post and comment, it's just that your posts and comments are no longer seen by others.
inigyou | an hour ago
ipaddr | 3 hours ago
gentooflux | 9 hours ago
JimDabell | 9 hours ago
polack | 8 hours ago
handoflixue | 7 hours ago
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
caymanjim | 4 hours ago
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
kshacker | 3 hours ago
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
thwarted | 2 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
inigyou | 8 hours ago
JimDabell | 7 hours ago
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
fragmede | 2 hours ago
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
E.G> when Taylor Swift wants to call Apple right now, how would she know what number to call?
Incidentally, https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-...
inigyou | an hour ago
trashface | 9 hours ago
cassianoleal | 7 hours ago
arikrahman | 4 hours ago
maxloh | 9 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
[OP] bathory | 9 hours ago
MarkMarine | 4 hours ago
slim | 9 hours ago
halJordan | 9 hours ago
LPisGood | 4 hours ago
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.
coldtea | 4 hours ago
Wasn't AI supposed to solve this? /s
nekusar | 2 hours ago
Turns out it wasn't dogfood.
https://stonetoss.com/comic/recycling/
fluidcruft | 3 hours ago
gre | 3 hours ago
AnonEM00se | 7 hours ago
I then looked at their age verification and it used that problematic company so I cancelled out.
chasil | 4 hours ago
Why on earth not?
fpoling | 3 hours ago
objclxt | 2 hours ago
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/
DocTomoe | 2 hours ago
what did you do to trigger a verification process?
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
ai_fry_ur_brain | an hour ago
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
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_brain | an hour ago
dotancohen | an hour ago
> 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".
varispeed | an hour ago
jingpostmedia | 9 hours ago
da_grift_shift | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
inigyou | 9 hours ago
idoxer | 9 hours ago
loloquwowndueo | 9 hours ago
Razengan | 9 hours ago
da_grift_shift | 5 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003
Artoooooor | 9 hours ago
alden5 | 4 hours ago
Rooster61 | 9 hours ago
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.
HarHarVeryFunny | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
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.
HarHarVeryFunny | 8 hours ago
I recall a Dario interview from a few years ago talking about security in terms of protecting their model weights and as I remember even back then they had hired ex. government security officials ... I would imagine they know exactly what to tell the government to make the "negotiation" go the way they want to. Unrelated to the current conversation, but one detail of that Dario interview I recall was mention that there is an assumption that in any organization over a given size trying to protect tech from foreign governments, there 100% will be spies on your staff, and you need to plan accordingly.
rescbr | 8 hours ago
So giving another win to China?
HarHarVeryFunny | 8 hours ago
rescbr | 3 hours ago
I'm not Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.
If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.
If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.
dpkirchner | 3 hours ago
preg_match | 3 hours ago
There’s a lot of individual actors in china, just like the US, but as a whole they take a “country” approach.
lostmsu | 48 minutes ago
ericmay | 8 hours ago
I’m not condoning this, just speculating.
Aurornis | 58 minutes ago
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.
I_am_tiberius | 9 hours ago
macic | 9 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
consumer451 | 9 hours ago
As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.
Discord dropped them after user backlash.
RaSoJo | 8 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
rvz | 9 hours ago
Never been a better time to use local models.
comboy | 9 hours ago
polack | 8 hours ago
QuiEgo | 4 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
jacomoRodriguez | 9 hours ago
furyofantares | 9 hours ago
I have no idea about Persona though.
tumdum_ | 9 hours ago
woadwarrior01 | 9 hours ago
Cider9986 | 4 hours ago
furyofantares | 7 hours ago
jacomoRodriguez | an hour ago
furyofantares | an hour ago
ascorbic | 4 hours ago
hazaskull | 9 hours ago
woadwarrior01 | 9 hours ago
peyton | an hour ago
jacomoRodriguez | an hour ago
secretslol | 9 hours ago
Obscurity4340 | 7 hours ago
secretslol | 2 hours ago
RaSoJo | 9 hours ago
0123456789ABCDE | 9 hours ago
verdverm | 8 hours ago
shevy-java | 9 hours ago
Razengan | 9 hours ago
WhrRTheBaboons | 2 hours ago
truthbe | 9 hours ago
https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund
holoduke | 9 hours ago
Overpower0416 | 9 hours ago
alaudet | 9 hours ago
realusername | 4 hours ago
antiframe | 4 hours ago
fortran77 | 9 hours ago
alaudet | 9 hours ago
"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."
verdverm | 8 hours ago
jjice | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
aqua_coder | 9 hours ago
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.
halJordan | 9 hours ago
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
Amir6 | 9 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
christoph | 8 hours ago
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.
Amir6 | 8 hours ago
johneth | 6 hours ago
christoph | 6 hours ago
CaliforniaKarl | 4 hours ago
So, I'd be careful calling Wise a "UK bank", as that gives the wrong impression.
More info about how Wise UK works: https://wise.com/help/articles/4IusAofIppsIGPcs7sEIXI/how-ou...
therein | 4 hours ago
blitzar | 2 hours ago
spprashant | 8 hours ago
greatgib | 8 hours ago
rzk | 8 hours ago
> 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 | 7 hours ago
nullbio | 4 hours ago
preg_match | 3 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 6 hours ago
general1465 | 5 hours ago
dang | 4 hours ago
827a | 4 hours ago
samename | 4 hours ago
christoph | 4 hours ago
preg_match | 3 hours ago
Anthropic could have EASILY made an in-house solution with < 100 employees. But no, they have to make the same mistakes that behemoths like IBM and Oracle make. Y’all haven’t even IPO’d yet and we’re already entering the “sleepwalk to your grave” phase of the corporate cycle.
gojibary | 3 hours ago
greenavocado | 2 hours ago
America passes many laws but doesn't enforce the majority of them and allows people to grow largely unencumbered unless their initiatives threaten established players or the system itself.
The Dissident: If you are vocal about the system, you get locked out at every opportunity from the things you depend on to sustain yourself and communicate (social media, housing and banking).
Red Ocean: If you try to compete in a red ocean and don't give a cut to the players in that space you're shut down with frivolous lawsuits for example by buried by frivolous patent or copyright claims, liability lawsuits, and licensure requirements.
Blue Ocean: If you are a compliant person and grow in a blue ocean, once you are big enough to where you can't realistically back down, you are threatened with prison time and sanctions unless you are onboard with the government's actual agenda and its preferred partners.
Secret Societies: Above a certain point you are expected to compromise yourself with blackmail to grow even further and become a part of the brotherhood that actually runs the government agenda.
kajman | 2 hours ago
greenavocado | 2 hours ago
Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
monksy | 2 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | an hour ago
tekchip | 4 hours ago
psalaun | 3 hours ago
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.
tadfisher | 3 hours ago
You might also consider shipping software-as-software, which doesn't need cloud resources, and the data can only be searched one customer at a time.
wahnfrieden | 3 hours ago
jsyang00 | 4 hours ago
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.
transcriptase | 4 hours ago
Seems to be working for every other AI company.
ianm218 | 3 hours ago
It feels like people here are not able to separate their personal dislike of the effective altruist types from a real debate on how big the stakes of AI are.
transcriptase | 2 hours ago
ianm218 | an hour ago
This is what I don’t really get about the AI discourse… I don’t have any reason to think this is all a veneer over capitalism. We don’t know what goes on in their head but the track record of the cofounders of Anthropic is quite honest so it feels like a conspiracy theory to suggest they are purposefully getting themselves nationalized when the simplest answer is that there is real documented concern on AI safety risk
actionfromafar | 3 hours ago
mad_tortoise | 4 hours ago
I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
alex_duf | 3 hours ago
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_BubbleTime | an hour ago
jackjeff | an hour ago
How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.
I normally run away from these ID checks. It’s just a matter of time until lone of these databases with everyone passports and videos get hacked. And vibe coding only makes it more likely.
I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
baw-bag | 47 minutes ago
Aurornis | an hour ago
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.
tamimio | 3 hours ago
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 | 3 hours ago
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.
Phelinofist | an hour ago
I'm rooting for China here, feels strange but well
cute_boi | 4 hours ago
You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?
data-ottawa | 4 hours 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.
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 | 4 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
fluidcruft | 3 hours ago
(Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)
misnome | 2 hours ago
johnsmith1840 | an hour ago
I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies.
But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.
coldtea | 4 hours ago
Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...
Barbing | 3 hours ago
jeromegv | 3 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.
pyeri | 3 hours ago
stavros | 3 hours ago
fjsoxjdnwk | 2 hours ago
The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.
Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.
stavros | an hour ago
chrsw | 19 minutes ago
Not sure what happened to Google in all this. They're falling out of the frontier race.
Aeolun | 27 minutes ago
pimeys | 2 hours ago
I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.
klardotsh | an hour ago
On NeuralWatt for my personal projects at home (not affiliated, just a happy customer), I get so much more mileage out of GLM than I get out of Claude at work, specifically because it's priced as a hammer I can pound any nail-shaped-object with, not a delicacy I need to carefully budget-analyze to try to figure out if it's worth burning my monthly spend limits on this task.
https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...
Den_VR | an hour ago
vanviegen | 53 minutes ago
girvo | 9 minutes ago
fragmede | 3 hours ago
Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.
sourthyme | 3 hours ago
anonuser123 | 3 hours ago
pimeys | 2 hours ago
GPT 5.5 is by far the best coding model.
Animats | 3 hours ago
Note the big cut in token prices from China.
[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml
ignoramous | 10 minutes ago
After 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 in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
hulahoof | 2 hours ago
(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
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.
calgoo | 2 hours ago
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632
rockskon | 2 hours ago
dgellow | an hour ago
- 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
andybak | an hour ago
crote | an hour ago
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?
cheonic52749 | an hour ago
I’m lazy.
I will simply upload my drivers license to Claude, and continue paying $200/month.
0x3f | an hour ago
deepvibrations | 30 minutes ago
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.
zsoltkacsandi | 2 hours ago
That is very well put.
cheesecakegood | 2 hours ago
0x3f | 57 minutes ago
cortesoft | 2 hours ago
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 | an hour ago
cheonic52749 | an hour ago
Your alternative:
Pay a Chinese or EU company for a third rate model.
The choice is yours.
FpUser | 37 minutes ago
I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
suddenlybananas | 35 minutes ago
InsideOutSanta | 2 hours ago
dgellow | an hour ago
Den_VR | an hour ago
beezlewax | an hour ago
lyime | 2 hours ago
ecocentrik | an hour ago
Phelinofist | an hour ago
...
> 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? :)
throw__away7391 | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago
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.
metalspot | an hour ago
aucisson_masque | an hour ago
metalspot | an hour ago
3y350n1y | 53 minutes ago
girvo | 8 minutes ago
What utter nonsense.
lmohseni | an hour ago
varispeed | an hour ago
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.
drnick1 | an hour ago
> 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 | 54 minutes ago
furyofantares | 58 minutes ago
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 | 49 minutes ago
Aurornis | 43 minutes ago
It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.
kgutscode1 | 12 minutes ago
Aurornis | 44 minutes 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.
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.
justaj | 32 minutes ago
kgutscode1 | 16 minutes ago
ignoramous | 27 minutes ago
I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies, for the past 3y.
RobertDeNiro | 6 minutes ago
nutjob2 | 6 minutes ago
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.
hailwren | 19 minutes ago
Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
zwaps | 4 hours ago
Shit now i have to cancel my account
throwaw12 | 4 hours ago
maxprimes | 4 hours ago
labrador | 4 hours ago
SXX | an hour ago
Fortunatelly its all just secuiry theatre so no one cares.
photios | 4 hours ago
othmanosx | 4 hours ago
blitzar | 2 hours ago
ur-whale | 4 hours ago
oceanwaves | 3 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | 3 hours ago
>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 | 3 hours ago
surume | 3 hours ago
gravity2060 | 3 hours ago
unshavedyak | 3 hours ago
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.
tamimio | 3 hours ago
dpkirchner | 3 hours ago
SXX | an hour ago
Though considering how many americans dont have passports its will be like shooting themself in a foot.
zaptheimpaler | 3 hours ago
zb3 | 2 hours ago
userbinator | an hour ago
padjo | 3 hours ago
slopinthebag | 3 hours ago
rzerowan | 3 hours ago
dwa3592 | 3 hours ago
dwa3592 | 3 hours ago
mounz | 3 hours ago
chickensong | 3 hours ago
monksy | 2 hours ago
chickensong | 2 hours ago
skywhopper | 3 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
So an expired ID is not verifiable in the same way a fake one isn't.
13415 | an hour ago
dofm | 48 minutes ago
dev1ycan | 3 hours ago
redbell | 3 hours ago
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 | 3 hours ago
Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago
dom96 | 2 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
(I believe some EU countries do have digital attestation tools?)
chickensong | 2 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
chuckling in slightly mischievous British
Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?
chickensong | 2 hours ago
dofm | 2 hours ago
So maybe Persona has developed tools for this specific form of eligibility check?
chickensong | 2 hours ago
bnj | 2 hours ago
Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?
dofm | 2 hours ago
bnj | 2 hours ago
Maybe I just don't understand the definitions?
dofm | 2 hours ago
nailer | 2 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
aftbit | 2 hours ago
g42gregory | 2 hours ago
Corporate accounts, in the US, will have full personal identification through the corresponding company's HR.
qezz | 2 hours ago
But that's obviously just a speculation.
SV_BubbleTime | an hour ago
itake | an hour ago
jbverschoor | 2 hours ago
It's not
monksy | 2 hours ago
g42gregory | 2 hours ago
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.
jimmydoe | 2 hours ago
there are tons of US providers supports Chinese models. Chinese labs give them weights, they don't give back user info in return.
miki123211 | 2 hours ago
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.
g42gregory | 2 hours ago
kingkongjaffa | 2 hours ago
I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.
jimmydoe | 2 hours ago
petre | 2 hours ago
octagons | 2 hours ago
Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.
_bobm | 2 hours ago
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.
p0w3n3d | 2 hours ago
userbinator | an hour ago
dvduval | 2 hours ago
georgemcbay | 2 hours ago
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 | an hour ago
dgellow | an hour ago
jchw | 2 hours ago
dsign | 2 hours ago
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.
kylehotchkiss | an hour ago
sinker | 2 hours ago
IAmGraydon | an hour ago
sinker | an hour ago
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.
ai_fry_ur_brain | an hour ago
Im really not sure why anyone would spend 15k to run local llms. The models you'll be able to run (70b) param models will be incredibly underwhelming.
choo-t | 46 minutes ago
Is this assuming no price increase and no throttling ?
jerry4next | an hour ago
dgellow | an hour ago
jerry4next | an hour ago
On a side note I have been playing around with local LLM and while it works, the speed is the bottle neck for me.
starik36 | 56 minutes ago
https://imgur.com/ugXQ6Eb
jerry4next | 51 minutes ago
originalvichy | an hour ago
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 | 2 hours ago
btown | an hour ago
atmosx | an hour ago
And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.
appplication | an hour ago
fragmede | an hour ago
Or they won't. They're not Facebook.
llm_nerd | an hour ago
We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
neosat | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago
...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 | an hour ago
Alien1Being | an hour ago
I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.
jasonvorhe | an hour ago
SXX | an hour ago
Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
kylehotchkiss | an hour ago
SilverElfin | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago
hmate9 | an hour ago
fithisux | an hour ago
This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.
We knew that from the start.
phreack | an hour ago
nickandbro | an hour ago
spiffistan | an hour ago
dgellow | an hour ago
ares623 | an hour ago
"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"
fragmede | an hour ago
noiv | an hour ago
AtNightWeCode | an hour ago
sph | an hour ago
fizlebit | an hour ago
aucisson_masque | an hour ago
That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.
How could they do that ?
13415 | an hour ago
maccard | an hour ago
giancarlostoro | an hour ago
I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
yuzuquat | an hour ago
Aurornis | an hour ago
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.
userbinator | 56 minutes ago
lofaszvanitt | 53 minutes ago
nedt | 52 minutes ago
Aeolun | 32 minutes ago
Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.
How is it always the same company doing the verification too?