The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.<p>The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.<p>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.<p>Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.<p>So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...</a><p>> 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.<p>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 decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.<p>Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.<p>If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".<p>If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're <i>perpetually</i> at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.
You're way off the mark, and probably viewing this as an American.<p>If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.<p>When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
> When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.<p>Completely agree.
> <i>This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old...</i><p>I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.
What makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?
Export controls have typically been for physical goods. Don’t remember the last time it was used for an API
You should look up the words "crypto wars". There were absolutely very annoying attempts by the US government to limit encryption, forcing every software maker to maintain two editions of their software: one targeting the domestic audience with no restrictions, and one "international edition" which had to intentionally weakened encryption (as in ship with shorter key lengths).
Have we all forgotten PGP already? (Not an API, but certainly not a "physical good")
> Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate<p>I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have.<p>This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.
I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.
> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.<p>Note the big cut in token prices from China.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml</a>
> <i>Note the big cut in token prices from China.</i><p>After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.
I just got finished setting up an environment with MiMo-Pro-2.5-UltraSpeed, Qwen-3.7-Max (basically used this to sub in for Opus), and of course DeepSeek.<p>Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even <i>better</i>.
You need to look up loss leader strategy and dumping in international trade because that is what china is doing. And your use of their models over api is giving them training data.<p>They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.<p>But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.<p>The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.
I made the same switch. Impressed with the sheer value of Deepseek v4 Pro and Minimax M3 so far. I mostly work on an open source academic simulation tool, so I’m happy to be a source of training data.
Most the Chinese models are open source. You can buy some hardware and go run them yourself, if you really are concerned about "dumping" and "loss leaders".
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.<p>> 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.<p>Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.
> <i>banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free</i><p>It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.
What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?<p>I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan
Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.<p>The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.<p>However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.<p>I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.
Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.
As an American founder I am sorry for this. I think the world needs to band together to take geopolitical risk out of AI.
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.<p>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.
Persona already had scandals earlier this year:<p>- <a href="https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-surveillance-capabilities/" rel="nofollow">https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...</a><p>- <a href="https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-users-blast-uk-age-checks-and-data-practices" rel="nofollow">https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use...</a><p>It’s off putting outside of HN
> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on<p>Why? Is Claude <i>really</i> 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?<p>Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't <i>everyone</i> 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.
> What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?<p>I’m lazy.<p>I will simply upload my drivers license to Claude, and continue paying $200/month.
Subscription prices. Anthropic subscription can't be used with third party harnesses. OpenRouter would require me to pay API prices.
Sure if you want to share your ID and information with Persona.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632</a>
It's pretty obvious this has nothing to do with Fable
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.
Completely disagree that 99% of people will just do it.<p>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.
The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.<p>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.<p>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 worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner.<p>Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company?<p>There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.
> 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.<p>Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.<p>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.
Why, is there any evidence to support your claim?
There is a long history of US export restrictions on technologies. They have all been temporary.<p>It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.
Temporary as in it lasted for quite some years, not temporary as in it was dropped within months. That's a very long timescale for this sort of field.
From outside the US, there has been so much "extraordinary" stuff happening in US politics recently that it's almost expected now.
Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.<p>Even if it's never lifted, probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.<p>Open models will catch up to Opus 4.8 and state of the art will, most likely, continue to get better. It won't be long before "better than Opus 4.8" is not a big deal.
> <i>probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.</i><p>If you buy the story that Anthropic's marketing hype drove US regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.<p>The best case real reason is Anthropic pissed off the administration.<p>Which will leave OpenAI, Google, Meta, and X far more vulnerable to government data sharing requests... and KYC identity is incredibly valuable to mandate for those.
That is my best guess too, which is an even better case for better-than-Opus-4.8 models being available from OpenAI without drawing the attention of the administration.<p>I do think their marketing hype was a factor though even in this narrative. Andrew Jassy tells a vengeful admin that there's this jailbreak for a model Anthropic said was dangerous, and vengeful admin seizes the opportunity to take vengeance.
GLM 5.2 is better than opus 4.8 bro what are you talking about
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.<p>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.
Have you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.
They are but from our evals for example GLM 5.2 (unquantized) performs as well as Opus but uses more tokens and takes more time.<p>I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.
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).<p>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.<p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-opus-4.8" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...</a>
I thought true token use was being hidden by anthropic and openai both
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 <i>that</i> 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.
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.
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.<p>The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.<p>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.
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.<p>> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market<p>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.
How does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.
Kings come and go. These types of decisions can actually kill a king. Not instantly, of course. But still.
right now the best contender is GLM 5.2, right?<p>either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too
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.<p>Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
> As a non-US citizen<p>...<p>> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models<p>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? :)
Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, <i>again</i> as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...
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.
Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.<p>And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.
> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access<p>That is very well put.
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.
I don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product.<p>Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.<p>Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.
You underestimate how large the US market is.
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.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to<p>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.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.<p>Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.
If you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: <a href="https://omnigent.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://omnigent.ai/</a><p>(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)
> 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.<p>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.
> That’s totally unclear.<p>Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature.<p>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.
><i>That’s totally unclear.</i><p>Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...
I can't build workflows on something that can randomly be unavailable for over a week.<p>At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.
Right, if we saw an open-source Mythos release today, I’d expect it to move the government’s idea of security goalposts.
That's the implied suggestion from the verification that they can prove to only share it with US citizens
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.<p>(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)
Or its to stop industrialized distilation efforts?<p>I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies.<p>But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.
As is everything coming out of the US these days.<p>If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.
This page has been up since April: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...</a><p>I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.<p>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.
Thanks. I went looking for how to actually verify myself as I would love to get access to Fable again. This post confirmed it, it's not relate to Fable at all and has been around. Thanks.
Anthropic’s -updated- privacy policy allows age and identity checks for Claude consumer users starting July 8th.
Did anthropic bar the use of any of their models behind an ID process back in April?
The answer seems to be yes [0]. Although I think it's important to state The Web Archive link proves that the recent Fable banning was not the catalyst for the page being linked.<p>Will Fable be back behind an ID verification step? I wouldn't be shocked if that happened. However, this specific support page and the ID veridiction process is not new. It is currently enforce.<p>It appears (but I can't be certain and don't think it's in bad faith) that many people are under the assumption that this is a result of the Fable banning. As a datapoint, I did some form of KYC verification to use OpenAI's cybersecurity platform a few weeks ago.<p>To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.<p>[0]: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_ive_been_forbidden_from_using_claude_now/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_iv...</a><p>Edit: truthbe above pointed out there was a privacy policy change.
nice to know it!!!
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!<p><a href="https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organization-verification" rel="nofollow">https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...</a>
Thankfully, OpenAI's check <i>is not required</i> if you use their models through OpenRouter!<p>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.
From that page:<p>> At this time, retries are not supported. You can continue using OpenAI’s platform with your existing access.<p>That's ridiculous, especially as their list of reasons that verifications can fail include "There was a technical issue during submission".
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I changed my macos system password and haven't been able to log into the macos chatgpt app since. It cant save the auth to wherever it tries. So bad.
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).
I had immense trouble buying api quota as a startup with a brex card and a C corp.
><i>OpenAI has notoriously terrible engineering.</i><p>Wasn't AI supposed to solve this? /s
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.
GLM-5.2 has been very good
The cost on Deepseek is so low, it's no wonder it's the top on open router. You can even use it from other vendors like cloudflare.
I got an email from OpenAI letting me know I won’t be a teenager anymore next week. It’s so exciting to have AI roll back my age by more than half!<p>I then looked at their age verification and it used that problematic company so I cancelled out.
That is a really terrible design.<p>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.
Anthropic claim that if you have a verification issue, they will give you support; remains to be seen what that will actually come down to
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.
As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...<p>what did you do to trigger a verification process?
It's frustrating that I can't find docs that even pretend to answer this question. Maybe it's my fault, maybe I overlooked it? I hope so.<p>To me, without documented use cases where you might/likely/certainly trigger identity verification, how can I properly limit my curiosity as someone who will gladly stay on the safe side for SOTA cloud model use? I'll happily stay away from these topics if I'm informed on what they are, even if the docs are vague.<p>Does anyone have insight into the answer to this? What API calls? What user behavior? What topics should I let go unanswered (or converse about with local LLMs) if I want to avoid losing access to the tooling?<p>The thought that they don't/won't publish this document should scare everyone. That leads to "because I said so" service refusal that is a very slippery slope.<p>I do understand that all businesses are allowed to refuse service to me in the USA, from food trucks to AWS, and that's fine with me. But at least tell me your rules and extra verification trigger criteria so I have a chance of not using your service in a way that concerns you.
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.
Or make a new account?
You risk being silenly flagged and get nerfed responses. Somehting like shadow dumbed down.
That is an inherent and unavoidable risk regardless, as things stand if you want access to frontier models you are at the mercy of their providers.
That’s quite a claim. What’s your source for this?
So ... like reddit! :)<p>Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
HN also has shadowbans. If your preferences have showdead=yes, you might see some.
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.
Isn’t that definitionally impossible? If they tell you about it then it’s not a shadow ban.
Reddit doesn't tell you you're shadowbanned. You are thinking of regular banned.
No they don't and if they do tell you that means you have been banned.
"It only took two years for my friend to appeal a Ban"<p>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.
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.
So I’ll just automate failed verifications for everyone I want to lock out?
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.<p>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<p>I see you have an uncommon name.<p>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.<p>When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.<p>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 :)<p>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.<p>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.<p>My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
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.
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.
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.<p>They know who you <i>claim</i> 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.<p>> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?<p>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?
Of course not, that's why I fail verification as them. If I had their passport I'd pass verification as them.
>Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?<p>You do not need real documents if your goal is to get the person locked out by using fake documents.
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.
How do they get the customer support number to that celebrity?<p>E.G> when Taylor Swift wants to call Apple right now, how would she know what number to call?<p>Incidentally, <a href="https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-service-11969480" rel="nofollow">https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-...</a>
I presume you get connected somehow when opening up a high-value account at a participating bank. If that account has some sort of concierge service, I presume that’s how special numbers for other companies might be distributed.<p>Pope Leo is not that rich, and had lived outside the US for many years (he came up in the church hierarchy of Latin America), so it’s not that surprising that he ran into this situation.
Link: 403 Not Allowed
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or you can scan you retina using sam altmans device and get access immediately /s
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Control over... my government ID? I understand why someone might oppose this on systemic grounds if they don't believe that frontier models have dangerous capabilities, but I don't understand what the personal risk to me of ID verification is supposed to be. Unlike Discord, Anthropic has my credit card info, so they already know who I am.
For one you have to send your info to Persona, who will no doubt at some point start abusing the info they have on you.<p>If they don't start doing it immediately that is...
If you are comfortable with your ID scans sitting who knows where then I guess you are their target. Real fun starts when you identity gets stolen tho.
Why did you provide an ID to use an LLM... You're a mark
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 <i>can</i> (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.
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”.
They would have access to IDs and whatever photos or real time video/audio is requires to verify. That's a big step towards building quite a large dataset for ID systems used for surveillance, for example.<p>There's also always the risk of not knowing who gets those documents later. The Dutch didn't think much of keeping detailed records including religious affiliation until the Nazis rolled into town.<p>LLM use is obviously much less politically charged today than religion was then (or ever), but that can always change, especially when an administration has already attacked said LLM provider as being something along the lines of a dangerous enemy of the state.
> 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.<p>And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.
> They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure<p>Or they won't. They're not Facebook.
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.<p>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...
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<p>Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc<p>Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners.<p>The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.
> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1</a><p>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.
you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries
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: <a href="https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-commercial-pink-tax-controversy-toxic-masculinity-metoo-a8731821.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
ISPs are legally protected. AI companies are not.
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>The two most significant factors at the physical level are<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> AI companies are frankly far more limited.<p>I'd counter the exact opposite. You can purchase GPUs on the open market, they're just expensive. You can install the GPUs anywhere in the world, it doesn't need to be a particular street or a particular house. Suitable land and infrastructure for a large factory is similarly scarce and expensive and might need to be built out at great time and expense but that doesn't make heavy industry a natural monopoly.<p>Sure, there's currently a supply crunch for a lot of this stuff (ex gas turbines) but temporarily bad market conditions doesn't make something a natural monopoly either.
Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.
Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets.<p>It’s not entirely dissimilar.
Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.
> 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...<p>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.
Why aren't we talking about bank neutrality?
This is gonna bite the US long term very bad.<p>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.
In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums.<p>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.
what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?
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.
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'
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
Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching<p><a href="https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund" rel="nofollow">https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund</a>
Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633</a> - 67 days ago, 100 comments<p>As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.<p>Discord dropped them after user backlash.
I agree. Given the very recent Discord pullback, this feels forced upon Anthropic.<p>I suspect that Anthropic had to select from a set of government approved ID verifiers.<p>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
Any sort of identity/age verification here is problematic and unacceptable.
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.
In my case, the ethical AI theatre fell apart as soon as I read about their first military contracts, specifically with the US government.<p>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 :)”
Agreed, this is crazy, and is exactly why the administration did what it did. However, every frontier model will require this within months.
You're right. I want to say that openai is a viable alternative, but they're even less trustworthy.<p>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.
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.
So... do you know why they were labeled that way?
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.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/ugXQ6Eb" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/ugXQ6Eb</a>
Do you believe OpenAI won’t face the same troubles?
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).<p>I may very well stop using Claude due to this.<p>Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.
> making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.<p>So giving another win to China?
> suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government<p>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.<p>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.
What new requirement? The linked page is months old.
May I remind you to download GLM 5.2 weights for just in case?
Of course you don't like it. Which is why it is being spread around, even though it has nothing to do with Fable.
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.<p>I’m not condoning this, just speculating.
> and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).<p>They’ve had this process in place for a long time.<p>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.
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.<p>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.
>Verification data stays between you, Persona<p>The company that already had a data breach incident & has ties to palantir. Also used by OpenAI to ensure you can't escape it.<p>Now we just need to tie this in with Sam's eyeball scanning tech for maximum dystopia vibes
Persona is also a core provider in jurisdications implementing ID laws for social media and other web services.<p>Considering the ties to Palantir and America's mass surveillance apparatus, one could even argue that a primary goal of the admin could be to use the USA's current AI lead to accelerate the adoption of web ID laws, and global push to deanonymize all web traffic.
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.
It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5<p>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"
> It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5<p>This help page has been there for a long time. Long before Fable was announced.<p>Their ID process isn’t new.<p>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.
Persona isn’t just an id upload. It’s also face scan by video.
So a fake ID but using your face?<p>How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.<p>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.<p>I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
Surprised there isn't a "Fake Face" market like a mannequin face delivered to your door.
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 <i>known</i> 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.<p>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.
How America Works, 2026 Colorized:<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy<p>Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?<p>All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
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.
Not just the government! techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/texas-government-data-breach-allowed-hackers-to-steal-3-million-drivers-licenses-and-passports/
> People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.<p>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.<p>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.
also it's not protected by the 4th amendment like an actual diary would, right? it's bullshit
They also force tap access to the data
> DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts<p>I'm rooting for China here, feels strange but well
> Pointless CYA<p>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.
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.<p>I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
Perhaps they should stop being holier than thou wackjobs and try the “shut the fuck up and act like a business” strategy of being a business.<p>Seems to be working for every other AI company.
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.<p>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.
Just pay the bribes already.
I agree this is entirely theatrical.<p>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.
>disallowed because of their place of birth<p>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.
<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
This page has existed since way before the current Fable controversy.<p><a href="https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858</a>
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).
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.
Fortunately the 2nd Amendment exists.
In the US, guns are apparently safer than Anthropic AI models :)
I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.
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.
Isnt your account linked to your bank card anyway? The problem is storing the chat logs.
> 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<p>This should definitely be a concern for any Claude user, especially given the open corruption of the current US administration.<p>If that alone doesn't concern you, everyone should <i>also</i> remember that Anthropic has accidentally released their own source code multiple times at this point.<p>Why should anyone believe they are going to handle your personal data with any more care than their own?
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.<p>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.
That's the problem with all these heuristics i guess. No one but phd historians and kids writing essays research inter-war Soviet history.<p>Which is of course false, but you can imagine that's what the heuristics say is true 90% of the time.<p>We're gonna lose quite a long tail of interests and hobbies when the llms take over
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.
Oh good, uploading your ID and selfie to the much-hated Persona. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, not happening. Gonna hope for the open models getting better and staying with what I've got for now.
> How are we verifying?<p>> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner<p>See this related thread regarding Persona:<p><i>OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632</a> - Feb 2026 (206 comments)
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.<p>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.<p>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'.<p>...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.)<p>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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguards<p>Since I read <i>I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over</i> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245</a>), I, somehow, start feeling very uncomfortable with ID verification as it appears there are actually many players processing my personal data, not just Persona.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>But that's obviously just a speculation.
Prepaid credit cards with cash would not be linked to your identity.
Well… maybe the real thing isn’t the headline thing?
Just canceled my subscription.
I don't want my id data end up with persona and/or the us gov.
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.
Wouldn't want the government to have your government-issued ID.<p>I have no idea about Persona though.
I know that this may sound surprising, but US is not the only country in the world ;)
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 would imagine this was written by someone not from the US.
In the EU and UK, data protection legislation applies to governments' handling of their subjects' data too.
Ohhh Emm Gee, the HN singularity has arrived.<p><i>chuckling in slightly mischievous British</i><p>Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?
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.<p>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.<p>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 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?<p>I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
Anthropic: we don’t want to be used for mass surveillance<p>Also Anthropic:
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 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
Just run the /insights command on your Claude and see what it gives you, you'd be shocked what it knows about you just talking to it.
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.<p>But hold on, collateral to what? Is this "our own personal jesus" access that we cannot live without or what?<p>People don't and cannot learn how to code or what? We don't know how to think?<p>I am calling their bluff. Fill your own gddam datacenters with "meaning".<p>Panta rei.
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes<p>I'm always curious about these stipulations. Its not like Anthropic would have a choice here what the legal demands are, but I don't see a commitment to make all requests as public as they legally can.<p>If the government were to say export controls mean you must share every identity verification attempt with us, it may be a long drawn out battle <i>if</i> Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.
Not a chance i'll be handing my id over to Persons. So what are the alternatives for AI coding these days?
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.
Oh, yes, they’ll only have my passport and selfie. I’m sure they couldn’t do anything with those.<p>Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.<p>How is it always the same company doing the verification too?
From that thread.<p>>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.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.c...</a><p>So this isn't new right?
Currently going through all my claude web chats and building conversation logs and downloading all my files as well as using the export function. Getting throttled pretty hard now. I have a max20 plan and will be canceling it at the end of my billing cycle. What disappointing news! I was all in until this identity verification requirement. I guess I will have to try out deepseek now.
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!<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861</a>
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.<p>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?”<p>I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.<p>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.
Out of pure curiosity, which UK bank was it?
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?<p>Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.
I want Anthropic to be the good guys.<p>I think Anthropic should explain why they're doing this particular partnership.
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?
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.
Yeah that'll be a pass for me.
Is there any info on what these "certain capabilities" are?
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?
Is exactly the question. Maybe this will actually make that happen.<p>(I believe some EU countries do have digital attestation tools?)
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.
all the paid spies in the comments being like... 'f this is bad for the U.S., the U.S. is doing something terrible'
Makes one ponder how there really is no moat. If this rolls out as implied, it is immediately easy to switch providers, and I will.
I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D
Not gonna happen. I'll just just more of the Chinese models then. Digital I'd is a clear no from me.
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.
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.
Here is what I think it the game is:<p>1. Force KYC is US LLM providers, gleefully supported by the US LLM providers.<p>2. Next -> now Chinese LLM providers must use KYC in the "free market" Western world.<p>3. But we can's allow KYC information to go to China, can we?<p>4. Now Western customers can not access Chinese LLM<p>5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.
5. Chinese providers license their models to western partners, with the Chinese running training and the westerners running inference.<p>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.
this is ridiculous.<p>there are tons of US providers supports Chinese models. Chinese labs give them weights, they don't give back user info in return.
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.
They all have everyone ID's through payments already..
Yes, it’s the biometrics they’re after.
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.
They don't have nationality, I guess? Just card issuer origin and payment origin.
> We are not collecting more than we need<p>Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?
I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock
I wonder how good AI now is at generating plausible-looking identity documents, photos, and videos of a virtual identity...
Interestingly Persona offers an attribution process (“verified” or “not verified”) and no data is held. Why does Anthropic want a selfie?
Not defending this, and it's far from ideal, but also credit card details were already pretty much confirming identities already.
Alright, I'm off Claude.<p>That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.<p>How could they do that ?
I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?
So apparently the UK and Europe are sleepwalking into an identity collection en masse by the state and yet…
(Submitted URL was <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_anthropic_to_require_identity/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_...</a> - we changed that to what looks like the original source, but put the Reddit link in the toptext for context.)
How does it work in business settings? Is your employer going to send your ID information to Claude?
Are they paying Persona identities in Haiku credits? Is that why they chose them? It was only 4 months ago that company was dropped by discord.
Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.
Let us hope this only accelerates the proliferation of local models
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’?
The high costs are necessary for high speed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Not "local" in the literal sense, but I set it up to serve at half quant for $23/hr and full quant for $35/hr.<p>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?
Yes they mean open weight models offered by various providers
$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)<p>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.
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://ollama.com/library/glm-5.2">https://ollama.com/library/glm-5.2</a>
You can recoup the costs quicker if you resell access to your local LLM on a reselling service.
It will. Moves like this will only lead to a drift of brains and talents to tweak & tune open harnesses and open models.
There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.
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.
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.
Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?
Not really.
That's not the option most are going to take.
<i>shrug</i> 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's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.
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
I'm curious how multiple accounts come into play here. Does anyone know?
Very disappointing that they went with Persona, the company whose CEO regularly argues with people on Twitter and lies about their arguments.
Oh no that’s terrible. They even say the data is used by the external company to train and use however.<p>Shit now i have to cancel my account
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.
No I will not
> We are not collecting more than we need. We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity.<p>You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?
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.
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.<p>Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
If this is what it takes to get access to Fable I'll be sad, but go along with it. Fable was (at least in my testing) remarkably good.
I bet z.ai doesn’t even respond to US subpoenas
Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.
Ridiculous theatre.
This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after
This is a big win for LLMs from China and to a much lesser extent from Europe.<p>I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.
While this seems related to recent events, this page has been there for months. They have used it when they think an account is underage.<p>We talked about this previously : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633</a>
Since the end is near does anyone have a claude data export flow/tool they have used?<p>I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.
No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.<p>Never been a better time to use local models.
It will never stop amusing me that an expired ID is invalid for verification. How does that negate my identity? Particularly my age.
Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.
I'm glad I don't use Claude.
So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.
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.
The coding capabilities they offer, are their own.<p>This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.<p>We knew that from the start.
On the bright side maybe less people will use AI as a therapist if every thought they dump into it is now associated to their ID and home address
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?
Where are these "certain capabilities" documentes?
<a href="https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-our-privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...</a><p>"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."
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.
> you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone<p>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).<p>Photo ID is a real person (your hotel maid took photos) iPhone headroll is generated to match the real photo ID with AI.
YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.
This is an old page that pre-dates the Fable situation. Seems people only discovered it recently though.<p>Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago
Please God let a model or company as capable as Claude/Anthropic come along soon that doesnt require ID so that we don’t all end up as uncreative mind slaves.
> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.<p>What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.<p>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.
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).<p>I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.<p>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).
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.
One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".
Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI.<p>"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"<p>"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"
Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.
> How your data is protected<p>It's not
lol, absolutely not.
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 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.
ffs do it and give me fable.
Fuck.. How did y'all in the Land of the Free let it get this way
Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id
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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.
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Why would you need to do so?
I mean, the easiest starting step would be: Identity Verification via the methods Discord switched to after realizing Persona was horrible.<p>Much more ideally, some sort of government-ran zero-proof service where Anthropic can confirm solely that you are a valid US Citizen without Anthropic gaining enough PII to link my account to a particular legal identity (these already exist)<p>Of course, if your adversary can't just buy a dozen US Citizens, they're not really much of a threat to begin with... (there are lots of ways to buy people: explicit bribes, people of questionable loyalty, scam them, or just hack into a dormant account with an annual subscription)
How does a company verify its age?
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.
Doesn't say anything about age.
This particular IDV flow will be used with consumer Claude web accounts only.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003</a>
How does a dark lord born before the beginning of time verify its age?
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.
My email address in Claude contains my full name. I pay it with a bank card and the bank already verified my full identity.<p>Realistically this is a "who cares" for me. It represents very little if any incremental privacy loss.<p>The only question left is which countries will have access or if it will be USA only.