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Comment by ianm218 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really agree with it but the government is moving towards making you ID yourself to use frontier AI - i.e. only US citizens are going to be able to use Claude Fable supposedly. In that regime the AI companies would in fact know if you are a money laundering expert or a normal software engineer.

> The idea that an LLM can discern intent on any given prompt is farcical.

Not really though. For most people in most situations it's just not going to give you that info. Software security is a niche where its a bit strange in that there is 100X the amount of white hat users than bad actors and there's open source etc.

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The idea that checking for a US ID could possibly stop actual foreign bad actors from using it is also farcical. Millions of stolen identity documents can be bought on the dark web for relatively cheap. North Koreans have been hiring real American citizens for years to infiltrate tons of US tech companies as employees.

And ya, it's pretty easy to hide your intent once you have access.

Even that is overselling the effort. Last time I checked you could find IDs with a simple image search.

I think your really anchored on anyone successfully breaking restrictions means any restriction is impossible. So your starting from the position that if it is possible for any actor in the world to get past a restriction, then the whole restriction is a farce.

KYC for example does stop most money laundering and financial crime. The most resourced actors like governments/ cartels often find ways around and it is a game of cat and mouse. Normal citizens don't really stand a chance to get around most of them.

Like it feels like your logic is that we shouldn't do background checks for employment because North Korean spy agencies get past them sometimes?

Hiring an employee, and to a lesser extent opening a bank account, are much higher-touch processes than taking on new users for your massive-scale internet app. With bank accounts and KYC, transactions can be reversed, traced, frozen, etc. after the fact. You can't "take back" API responses the same way.

Clearly, there's no such thing as a perfect exclusion rule at any of these scales, but the false-negative to false-positive ratio seems like it will be way higher if Anthropic starts trying to verify IDs.

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