I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.

"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."

Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.

This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.

I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.

Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.

Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws /regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.

Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick!

>Damn, we hardly know who our users are

No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.

Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin.

What would be gained with government id that would make this worthwhile? If people are already putting all their personal details into the LLM as well as all their work, do they really need id to know who someone is? Seems more likely they just want to avoid liability from all the child suicides?

More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.

> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

I doubt that this statement is true.

I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.

Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.

And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.

This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem).

I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)

It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.

Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID?

What do you think is written on my credit card and my bill from Anthropic?

Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so.

> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :)

You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.

none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.

This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.

> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever

The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.

Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.

For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.

[dead]

It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data.

This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.

That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.

For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.

Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.

Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.