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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not comfortable with it, but I've already had to verify my ID in the past to people I trust substantially less to handle the images securely. I can understand why someone who's never previously generated a digital photo of their ID might be more worried.
Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.
It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...
> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality
From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.
These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.
Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.
The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas.
That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.
The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.
I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.
> Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.
This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).
Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.
The two most significant factors at the physical level are
1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.
2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.
AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.
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
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
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 that case you get crushed by Section 1981 of the Civil Rights act of 1866, Title II of the Civil Rights act of 1964, civil lawsuits, a hostile DOJ and state AGs, and vanishing customers.
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'
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.
I agree. Given the very recent Discord pullback, this feels forced upon Anthropic.
I suspect that Anthropic had to select from a set of government approved ID verifiers.
Considering Thiel's clout in the current govt's inner circle...3 out of the 4 choices would have been duds. Leaving the 4th as Persona, the only viable option
Meanwhile, apologia from the impartial influencer contingent is surely on its way to convince you "no! Persona IDV being allowed to train on my PII [0] is a GOOD thing! PLEASE don't vote with your wallet!"
I just hope there's huge protest. I hope people just cancel the subscription. I fear people will just accept the terms. The result will be a kill switch for the US government and a clean distinction between national and foreign users so spying will become legal. Surely Anthropic hasn't allowed the NSA connect so far, - openai clearly did (see their board members).
I really don't like that headlines have been surfacing about the US government putting pressure on Anthropic, and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).
I may very well stop using Claude due to this.
Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.
EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.
I suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government to re-enable Fable. Whatever "safety/security" measures the government requires of Anthropic will no doubt also be applied to other US "AI providers", perhaps based on assessed model capability. Apparently OpenAI already had an ID check in place before this.
What's going to be interesting is how the US government regulates US-based access to Chinese AI models, whether served domestically (e.g. GLM-5.2 from Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, etc), or from overseas.
I suppose if one fear is US domestic terrorists/hackers using AI, then restricting access to all models, regardless of country of origin, might make sense, but as far as restricting technology exports over national security concerns it wouldn't make much sense to restrict access to foreign models!
Crudely applied restrictions are likely to get worse before they potentially get better as the hype wears down and AI risk gets better assessed, but government control tends to be a one-way ratcheting up, so who knows. It's not inconceivable that the government may try to restrict use of local models too, which they could do by making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.
> suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government
I would have put “negotiations” in scare quotes. Who reported the Fable jailbreak to the government? Anthropic’s biggest shareholder. Who is now sitting at the table designing the “benchmarks” that will dictate what other model builders will be allowed to deploy? Anthropic. Who is also in talks with the government about a bailout? Also Anthropic. I just can’t take any of this at face value because that’s preposterous.
Agreed, Anthropic have been lobbying in favor of government regulation for a while now, and there is no indication that they are not getting exactly what they wanted. Maybe it helps to push any liability onto the government rather than themselves, and certainly let's then try to hand wash from any bad outcomes.
I recall a Dario interview from a few years ago talking about security in terms of protecting their model weights and as I remember even back then they had hired ex. government security officials ... I would imagine they know exactly what to tell the government to make the "negotiation" go the way they want to. Unrelated to the current conversation, but one detail of that Dario interview I recall was mention that there is an assumption that in any organization over a given size trying to protect tech from foreign governments, there 100% will be spies on your staff, and you need to plan accordingly.
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.
This might seem unrelated but on one of my free accounts. I tried to make Claude do some historical fact checking on the inter-war period of the USSR. The point isn't if it is true or not, but it felt like it would help quite a lot to see what the sources Claude finds says about the both sides of the picture and I was curious at some point.
Funnily enough, a day after this my account got banned under the pretext that I was a child using Claude and that I would need to verify my account. The age verifier said that it doesn't store my photos or anything. It gets cheeky though and indirectly it says it doesn't store what I upload but sends it to third parties that do store and sell it.
Its like saying I won't steal your money, but I will give it to the thief right over there for free.
Now the flagging might be entirely coincidental, but I just exported my chats and just never went on with the intention to re verify my account (since it is a free one basically and there is no incentive for me to do so).
Weirdly enough, I started to see my past chat history that I exported to check and see if there is any correlation between how I talked and if there might have been some instances in which the system might attribute said message as what a young person would say. Though from the looks of it, it didn't give any of that sort of vibe.
I’ve been waiting for days for an appeal decision on a suspension that I have zero clue on why it happened! I’m trying very hard not to hate Anthropic right now!
It’s all over the place. A UK bank i’d been with 7+ years for a business savings account suddenly started demanding ID or they would “limit” access (lock my money up until I dance to their tune). They already have all this. My identity nor address have changed in 15 years. The account is super low activity savings. Zero possible red flags.
The verification process started out as “just a photo of my driving licence” - turned out to be a video recording of my whole environment with no obvious previous mention or disclaimer of this. Then the requirement for a “quick selfie” suddenly appeared (pretends to be a photo but is full video again), I complied up until the “do you want your data processed by AI or the lowest bid in India?”
I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.
Opened a new building society account, which is all paper based for ID. I shall be opening many more such building society accounts that only deal in paper for ID purposes in the coming weeks.
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.
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 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.
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’?
$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered (a year ago it would have been more expensive, one person can spend that in a month or two)
I bought my spark and the models have already improved in that time (qwen3.6, speculative decoding 2x tgen, diffusion gemma 4x tgen) and I expect this to improve. Look out another 2-3 years, local is going to be very competitive.
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.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
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
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!
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.
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.
I mean, this feels exactly what had to happen after their announcement with Fable being restricted by the US government since the requirement is that they need to know you're a US citizen. You can argue this is Anthropic's fault due to their Mythos/Fable fear mongering, but at the end of the day this is a requirement by the US government to use this (and likely future models).
I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.
Best I can do is root for local models (already was), but I'll keep my Anthropic subscription for their "lesser" models without an ID (for now).
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.
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.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...
https://xcancel.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2064949876463645026
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
I dealt with a few instances of online ID verification recently, and in my experience, they don't close your application when your photo is not clear. They mark it as "awaiting customer response" and kindly ask you to upload again.
If they don't start doing it immediately that is...
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...
From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.
These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.
Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.
That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.
The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
It’s not entirely dissimilar.
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.
This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).
Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.
The two most significant factors at the physical level are
1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.
2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.
AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.
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.
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.
As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.
Discord dropped them after user backlash.
I suspect that Anthropic had to select from a set of government approved ID verifiers.
Considering Thiel's clout in the current govt's inner circle...3 out of the 4 choices would have been duds. Leaving the 4th as Persona, the only viable option
https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund
Meanwhile, apologia from the impartial influencer contingent is surely on its way to convince you "no! Persona IDV being allowed to train on my PII [0] is a GOOD thing! PLEASE don't vote with your wallet!"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777291
I may very well stop using Claude due to this.
Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.
EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.
What's going to be interesting is how the US government regulates US-based access to Chinese AI models, whether served domestically (e.g. GLM-5.2 from Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, etc), or from overseas.
I suppose if one fear is US domestic terrorists/hackers using AI, then restricting access to all models, regardless of country of origin, might make sense, but as far as restricting technology exports over national security concerns it wouldn't make much sense to restrict access to foreign models!
Crudely applied restrictions are likely to get worse before they potentially get better as the hype wears down and AI risk gets better assessed, but government control tends to be a one-way ratcheting up, so who knows. It's not inconceivable that the government may try to restrict use of local models too, which they could do by making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.
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.
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.
So giving another win to China?
I’m not condoning this, just speculating.
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.
Which is of course false, but you can imagine that's what the heuristics say is true 90% of the time.
We're gonna lose quite a long tail of interests and hobbies when the llms take over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
The verification process started out as “just a photo of my driving licence” - turned out to be a video recording of my whole environment with no obvious previous mention or disclaimer of this. Then the requirement for a “quick selfie” suddenly appeared (pretends to be a photo but is full video again), I complied up until the “do you want your data processed by AI or the lowest bid in India?”
I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.
Opened a new building society account, which is all paper based for ID. I shall be opening many more such building society accounts that only deal in paper for ID purposes in the coming weeks.
I have no idea about Persona though.
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?
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.
"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."
Never been a better time to use local models.
I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.
Best I can do is root for local models (already was), but I'll keep my Anthropic subscription for their "lesser" models without an ID (for now).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
(Detractors: I encourage you to turn "showdead" on in your HN settings and view its other comments before you jump to defense!)