Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or identity

ryanisnan

This feels deeply problematic. I would much prefer, where asked via appropriate legal processes, Anthropic serve over user data to government officials, and potentially suspend access.

pants2

Is this new news? > This policy was published on June 8, 2026 with an effective date of July 8, 2026

qsxfthnkp2322

This is a horrible idea and I’m sure it’ll go very well for them. /s

lnenad

I was really hoping we’d have more time before enshittification arrived. But apparently, an old Xeon running Qwen is my destiny.

timmg

They probably don't have much, I guess.

andrewstuart

If programming requires LLM/AI then regulation by government is needed to stop this overreach, which has the primary goal of banning you permanently forever making sure you can never come back to programming, in the event some AI in their system decides you have done something “wrong”.

throwaw12

Couple years ago the West was complaining about surveillance and scoring system of citizens in China (or was making fun of it) Seems like US wants to get ahead on this and be #1 Also Sam Altman will love this idea, because he already tried it with Worldcoin

etchalon

I should be worried about this, but Anthropic's products are a paid product. You can't use them without providing some identifying information, unless you're going out of your way to provide them inaccurate information. I generally dislike services which require this level of identity verification but also, so far, those have mostly been freemium services and community tools. And I dislike gating those communities. I'm sure I should have more of a problem with this.

onesandofgrain

So in practise this means I need to upload my passport to continue using the CLI and the chat?

SimianSci

More signal that the open-weight models should be our destiny as an industry. These proprietary models are being used to usher in more surveillance and gatekeeping across the industry.

micromacrofoot

that's what my credit card is for

kps

If Anthropic develops an AGI, it'll be too young to use any Anthropic services.

Rooster61

[Dupe]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618455

Aurornis

This is an updated terms of service, but they've had ID verification for certain accounts and situations for months. Here is the Wayback Machine archive from April of their identity verification help page: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c... Here's a random Reddit thread from 2 months ago about them rolling out identity verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1smr9vs/claude_is... Here is one random example thread of someone who got caught in identity verification with multiple follow-on comments from people who encountered the same problem, also 2 months old: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1sx25kd/buyer_b...

wren6991

That's fine, I already cancelled my subscription after they admitted to using PEFT to selectively and silently make their models dumber when working in certain technical fields. [ref: section 1.5 of Mythos/Fable 5 system card, https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3... ] Maybe that was petty, but I was already looking for alternatives after the obvious angling for increased regulation and suppression of local models. LLMs are software and I want to modify them and run them on hardware that I own.

CrzyLngPwd

Reason #1 why I won't be working with their stuff.

krumhausen

Hmm. giving my personal data away to an American company controlled by us gov that infringes people’s IP and is now using an ID verify by Peter Thiel.

gitfan86

This is their only option. Someone who is the head of security for a hospital IT department needs access to mythos, and some 17 year old with fraud convictions doesn't. It's the same reason we require ID for alcohol and gun purchases. Obviously it isn't a perfect system, teens drink but good luck suggesting that 13 year old should be allowed to buy alcohol.

petcat

US regulations on AI is going to make it more and more difficult for EU/UK/everyone else to access these model providers. At this point it's completely outgrageous that the EU, UK, or even Canada can't put forth the funding to develop their own local AI model industry.

thelonelyborg

this was inevitable