Identity verification on Claude
support.claude.com
support.claude.com
The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.
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.
Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.
So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies.
But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.
Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...
Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature.
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.
If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.
At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.
The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.
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.
Not sure what happened to Google in all this. They're falling out of the frontier race.
Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference.
Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions if its going to get blocked?
The difference between GPT-5/Opus 4 and GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8 is striking. For software development anyway, there's no comparison. And all this has happened in a year.
My assumption is there will be another 2-3 years of improvements ahead of us on LLMs alone. Through hardware upgrades, larger training runs, better data quality, better algorithms, etc.
Of course, by then these models will be quite expensive. Will my company pay for it? I don't know. I'm sure some people will though.
I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.
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.
https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...
Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.
GPT 5.5 is by far the best coding model.
Some people have been saying that 5.5 is on par with Fable and it's just nonsense.
Note the big cut in token prices from China.
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.
Tl;dr: The West competes itself into irrelevance while China cooperates its way to victory.
Whether or not the information war turns into a kinetic war depends largely on the West's ability to recognize that coercion, deception, and manipulation in the pursuit of dominance is not really an effective strategy in an information war.
The trouble with authoritarian governments is that they depend on competence in the authority.
Xi is 73 now.
Single party states in general, and communist China in particular, don't have a stellar track record of handling power transfers gracefully.
They don't need to. They can undermine the West economically and politically.
The US has been a much more violent imperial power but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
US imperialism has been a blight to the world, outright killing millions. Modern China did nothing on that scale.
> ...but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
"What IT has done overseas" refers to the US.
But as for China, the Great Leap Forward is considered the largest man-made famine in history, causing somewhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of irreplicable artifacts and historical sites.
Like the US, China has been involved in sowing discord and destruction in other countries. What the US did in Cambodia was an absolute travesty. But China was Pol Pot's primary backer, having provided around $1 billion in economic and military aid to the Khmer Rouge. So it's not like China was an idle witness to what happened in Indochina last century.
We can argue all day about the greater and lesser of two evils but my point remains: powerful countries can cause significant harm to the world without invading other countries.
I agree that Great Famine was horrible.
My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs (and actually dead people) any day. (Which was kind of the point of EHS, even in it's most neoliberal incarnation.)
The problem is that most of the time, economic war ends with tanks and bombs.
And is just pure nonsense, might as well claim that the US killed 548 million people, because in 1957 the US population was 172 million and had a TFR of 3.62 , assuming that trend held we would be at 720 million in 2026
The US is many things, but it’s still way more aligned with European, Canadian, Australian etc goals than China ever will be.
They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.
But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.
The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.
So while I am running local models I am aware of the geopolitical implications
China isn’t releasing open weight models for the good of humanity. They are releasing them to undermine US companies financial viability.
I care about that because that competition affects me.
Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even better.
(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)
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.
- https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...
- https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use...
It’s off putting outside of HN
Why? Is Claude really 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?
Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't everyone already be using OpenRouter & friends to avoid getting screwed over by the model-of-the-week - making a switch absolutely trivial?
I’m lazy.
I will simply upload my drivers license to Claude, and continue paying $200/month.
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.
In a vacuum yes. But this space isn't vacuum, I'm going with path of least resistance.
That is very well put.
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.
Your alternative:
Pay a Chinese or EU company for a third rate model.
The choice is yours.
I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.
...
> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models
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? :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.
What utter nonsense.
As defined by the politicians bought and paid for by the corporations via their lobbyists.
You actually think this is a good thing?
Sources?
Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.
Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.
So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.
> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market
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.
this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion.
just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people.
the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper.
if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?
Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.
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.
It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.
So why would you get that instead of self-hosting Mistral Studio and fine tuning for your needs? Or going fully DIY with e.g. OpenShift AI and open source Chinese models?
That way you fully control availability, costs and quality.
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.
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.
If you buy the story that Anthropic's marketing hype drove US regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The best case real reason is Anthropic pissed off the administration.
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.
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.
Having succeeded with Anthropic, it's reasonable to expect their next attempt will be:
"Nice new model, OpenAI, would be a shame if national security concerns tangled up a public release. Now let's talk about equity stakes..."
Totally meaningless.
Wow, how informative. Maybe I should go check my horoscope for if the Iran war will end next week...
> 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.
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.
> LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls.
In fact, earlier in the comment, he argues the ID check dates back to April
I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.
since January 2025
You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
> You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
> You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
Trump threatened. Those were unserious remarks by an unserious person who's 80 years old. If that was all it takes to permanently demolish those alliances, they were never actually there.
And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
> And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
Imagine you outsourced your entire company to a third party company and only have a few managers around. Then, you need to move all that support from the 3rd parties back in-house. Its not a task that is easy to do, and if we also take into account the required factories etc that need to be built to support, that takes even more time.
Its something that is happening, we are building new trade agreements with countries around the world, excluding the US. We are working on our own defense packs, and eventually if the US decides to leave NATO, or we form our own alliance, then that will happen.
And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
> Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter. And European countries are increasing military spending, by and large buying, in that order, domestic, European, major NATO aligned suppliers (most notably South Korea), and the US only when there is no choice (so F-35 and munitions/replacements for existing systems). And of course this ignores that current European military capabilities are plenty for European strategic autonomy.
> Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come. The American political system is broken beyond repair, and even the opposition to the current wannabe fascist regime are not campaigning to change anything about it. This means that regardless of who's in power next, even if they're the best thing since sliced bread, there is no guarantee the following elections won't bring another bout of wannabe fascists threatening to invade their allies.
There is no going back from that without major political reform in the US and years to earn back trust. AKA not happening. Even the opposition, even the most radical opposition, venerate American political institutions as the works of deities that can only be slightly changed, not replaced wholesale. And, from the outside, the whole system - how elections are done (you need proportional representation, term limits, no janky districts), representative structures (flat two seat per state senate doesn't work anymore, house of representatives having skewed and fixed numbers doesn't either), judicial system (political appointments and elections, and for life appointments, do not work), supreme court (political appointments and for life appointments do not work), etc are overdue by decades for serious structural reforms.
> And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on.
> What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter.
So what? You're claiming the alliance is irreparably broken, who cares about the text of a treaty?
Just do it, put your money where your mouth is.
> I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come.
I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
The alliance is broken, yes, and everyone is treating it as much. Kicking the US out, other than being impossible, will only piss off the petulant children.
> Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on
He was damn close to attacking Greenland, so much so that various European nations felt the need to send soldiers there to show they're commited to defending it. It doesn't matter that he didn't actually do the absurd.
> I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Geopolitical priorities and alignments take years to shift. So does military procurement. Once the US is no longer reliable, it will take years of reliability before there is a chance to mend the relationship.
> Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
I'm sorry, but that is just pure grade A American bullshit. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence to spout such nonsense. Various European countries spend to various extents. Nobody, is getting protection for "free". They're all pitching in to different levels (some like Poland, France, UK, definitely more than others). And the US was getting plenty in exchange, most notably bases to run their famous and intimidating logistics. The US definitely loses more out of losing those than European nations that have the British and French nuclear umbrellas if it push came to shove.
Elon Musk (not Trump) is actively still weaponizing algorithmic control of X to try to destabilize US "allies". Larry Ellison is doing the same thing with a whole swathe of media companies and TikTok.
The issue is the authoritarianism and patriarchal narcissism of an American-centered global elite who have gotten so used to "winning" they began to think it was God-given right and not something they'd achieved because their winning had (broadly speaking) been in everyone else's interest.
Now that their mindset has shifted to win at all (read: everyone one else's) cost(s) - do you REALLY think that everyone is going to blindly keep following? For how long?
We deployed troops to Greenland after his comments. Does that sound unserious to you?
So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.
You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.
If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.
When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
Completely agree.
I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.
Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.
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.
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".
If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're perpetually at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.
Anthropic didn’t have to beg for the government to deem their models a security crisis.
This access restriction could be
1) A legitimate concern about capabilities.
2) A hype-generation scheme entered into by both the Federal Government and Anthropic.
3) Pettiness.
If we're in situation #1 or #3, then there are no other LLM providers that provide comparable services that are safe from this.
If we're in situation #2... well, I guess how safe you are from this is a factor of how desperately the company needs "wau, look how scary our software is!1!1" hype.
I'm pretty sure that a US government export restriction / ban / etc. would count as a force majeure invalidating all the fancy wording you could wish for on a piece of paper.
The only way to actually control is to self manage in an environment you control.
I can't speak to your specific use of Anthropic's models, but I find it interesting that people will identify themselves (to set up and pay for an account) and provide all sorts of personal (and often sensitive if not confidential) information to these models on a daily basis, but balk at a 5-minute identity verification.
The National Public Data breach alone exposed the social security numbers of potentially upwards of 100 million Americans. Numerous companies have literally "all" of your personal data and you never did business with them/gave it to them directly.
It's not right but the identity theft cat is out of the bag, which is why precautions like credit freezes, are recommended for all Americans.
> But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.
The identity verification they're doing is for legal purposes. Even if they have a way to take your name and IP address and figure out who you are with near-absolute certainty (including through the use of third-party databases), they're doing this so they have a legally-defensible process by which identities were established.
Not if you are using through your employer.
> they're doing for legal purposes
The USA is becoming a Banana Repulic. Having grown up in one, you end up learning that "the law" is never meant to be used for the benefit of the people but only to give the veneer of legitimacy for the authoritarian abuse by those in power.
“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”: https://www.undp.org/latin-america/blog/graph-for-thought/%E...
Many companies are required by law to verify the identities of their customers (for money laundering, sanctions compliance, etc.) and to do so in a certain way they can document.
Thinking that the US is a Banana Republic in which laws are applied differentially doesn't inherently mean that every rule that requires you to go through a process you don't like is unfair/unjust.
Not if you can avoid it, no.
> every rule is not based on a legitimate concern?
This particular rule is not based on a legitimate concern.
Well, there are multiple legitimate reasons for Anthropic to ask some customers to do identity verification:
1. To comply with export controls.
2. To prevent abuse.
3. To process requests for increased usage or spend limits.
4. To defend against payment fraud.
This really isn't uncommon. I've been asked to do identity verification for something as innocuous as registering a domain name, setting up an account to bid on collectibles, etc.
If you've ever worked in ecommerce, payments or a related sector, you know how many bad actors are trying to game systems every single day and what the consequences are to the business if they succeed. Even when you're not dealing with non-negotiable compliance requirements (like KYC, export controls, etc.), there are lots of situations in which you'd have a reasonable need to establish that the people you're serving are who they say they are.
Why is that? Why is so hard for you to see that Anthropic by pushing the "our models are so good that regular people should not have access to it" narrative, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot?
Your position seems to be based on lack of knowledge of the fact that the US government has broad authority to regulate AI services under existing national security and export control powers.
You can argue that those powers are wrong, but these powers are well-established and perfectly legal.
Anthropic could challenge these in court but, from what I've read, most attorneys specializing in this area of law believe it would face an uphill battle in courts because the related powers are so broad and well-established.
I understand they have the authority. The point that you keep evading to answer is "Why Anthropic only? Why now?".
More than that: why do you keep arguing that people should just accept it? Why do you think that we should just roll over and accept these rules?
I am not asking you "what the courts would say", I am asking you personally: you really don't see a problem in normalizing a world where people can only conduct business if they subject themselves to give away personal data? Do you think that Surveillance Capitalism is just something that people need to accept as some natural state of affairs?
Companies like Meta and Google collude with media/publishers/online service providers to track you across the web and use your data to target you for advertising even when you aren't registered or logged into their services. Data brokers whose names nobody knows gather and sell information about every single American. Credit bureaus track some of your most sensitive financial data whether you like or not, and sell it to companies who use it to make some of the most important decisions that affect you financially.
Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business with Anthropic for ID so that they can comply with sanctions laws is not the same thing.
This is some weird whataboutism, and it doesn't answer my question.
> Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business
Anthropic is changing the terms. It used to be until last week that ID is not required. Now it is. Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway". This is the part I am struggling to understand.
The Anthropic page related to ID verification is not new. It existed in April and had some minor changes made last week.
https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/
We can disagree, but please don't misrepresent the facts: new customers are not being required to verify their ID by default, nor are existing customers being contacted en masse to do so. ID verification is being used with some customers and it appears this is primarily related to account suspensions that are typically due to usage patterns, fraud concerns, etc.
> Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway".
I'm not saying anything of the sort. What I am saying is that I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
Even though Anthropic says that its ID verification is not related to Mythos/Fable, in our discussion, I have pointed out that as a US company, Anthropic could be required to comply with various export controls that are implemented under well-established and perfectly-legal export control regulations.
It is also perfectly normal for companies to require ID verification for some customers under certain circumstances to address legitimate usage and fraud concerns.
If they want to use Mythos, they need to provide the ID. It has become a two-class service.
> I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
You have no inherent, God-given legal right to access Mythos. Once again, the US government (and in particular the executive branch) has a broad and well-established legal authority to regulate advanced technologies under national security and export control regulations.
If you want to buy, say, the most advanced NVIDIA chips, you can be subject to verifications as well because these are subject to export controls.
> The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
Anthropic is a private company. It is allowed to decide how to provision its service, and make changes to its service. This has absolutely nothing to do with "Surveillance Capitalism".
You have the right to vote with your wallet, which you have done. If enough people make the same decision, Anthropic will likely have to reconsider its decisions. That's capitalism, is it not?
Also, you are talking a lot about what Anthropic can do but completely evading to actually say what you think they should do. It tells me that you know how reprehensible their ethics are, but for some reason you refuse to reject them.
It seems that you just don't like the way Anthropic is run, and a focal point of that is that you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
To be clear: the US government issued an order that required Anthropic to suspend access to Fable and Mythos by any foreign national. The company had to comply or it could face significant penalties. According to the company, the only way it could comply with the government order was to suspend access to everyone.
The ID verification page being discussed here has been around since before this order was issued. Like many companies, Anthropic may ask some customers for ID verification, primarily to prevent fraud and abuse. ID verification is not required to sign up, and existing customers are not all being asked to perform it.
Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged, but not making the latest and greatest models available to everyone who wants them and complying with legal government orders are not the strongest arguments about their ethical shortcomings.
Not in the particular. What I care about is the concentration of power and having to live in a world where a handful of corporations fully dictate how everyone should work.
> you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
Not at all. I don't personally care. You can find me on record saying that I'd rather work with local models that are "dumber" but can simply assist me through a process, instead of outsourcing all my thinking to a huge LLM.
> Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged
But you are still sticking by them, aren't you? Why?
I don't recall Anthropic's payment systems, but I use Paypal wherever supported. I don't think Paypal sends my address, but am not sure. I'm pretty sure they don't send the CC information.
And often, not even the name (e.g. have often had people use my CC to buy stuff (with my permission)).
Also, I still routinely buy stuff from one service that thinks I'm in a state I haven't lived in for over 20 years, because that's the address I provided back then.
So no, generally, sending your payment info doesn't equate to sending them my address.
> When you check out with PayPal, the merchant will receive info that is necessary to process the transaction and prevent fraud. This may include:
> Your name, email address, amount received
> Your shipping address and phone number
So many people have internalized an anonymous audience that they are performing to in terms of what they think the anonymous audience wants to hear that they can't tell what is their own actual thoughts and motivations.
That is why the motivation changes two weeks later and the ID gets uploaded.
Most people understand or at least accept that in order to facilitate payments and a company to follow various laws that are generally understood as "good for all" (like AML and tax avoidance), but require ID to access is not the same.
It is identical to accepting to paying for National Parks car pass or camp ground fees but protesting access fees. Not the same thing.
Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.
What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?
I do not want to give my private data to any company, yet alone those hostiles US companies that obey the orange king. Insanity has to be contained, not allowed to spread outside of the USA. So, no to age sniffing.
The UK is also suspect here. I don't understand why they are even worse than the USA here. Someone needs to fix the UK legislation - it is by far the worst. On audits they regularly detain people and pat them down. See Auditing Britain or DJ Audits; the US Audits on the other hand almost never reach that level of escalation. Something is fundamentally flawed in the UK.
1. Identity verification as a way to validate real-personness and mitigate distillation by e.g. North Korea
2. Identity veriiication as a way to limit model usage to US residents / citizens
3. The level of model which will be subject to identity verification, today and as time goes on
It’s a mistake to conflate the three and form a rock solid opinion of exactly what will happen from here to the heat death of the universe. Everything about AI is moving quickly. I doubt Dario would claim to have a perfect roadmap not subject to change.
My personal guess is that just like export controls on CPUs, this will apply differently to different regions, and will change over time. Especially with US political instability and increasing anti-science policy, I cannot imagine Dario or anyone else would want to surrender the EU and other markets to become a US-only company.
But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing I’m not is certain. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in the current situation.
But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.
In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?
There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.
Well, irrespective over as to whether this is the case, the blog entry from claude came yesterday, aka June:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...
So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.
The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.
There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.
Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.
But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.
Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.
Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"
Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.
Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
You think some people aren't "deserving" of the best models?
> 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.
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.
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.
Also worth pointing out that most Americans don't have passports and getting one can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.
Also, you'd have to be smoking something to assume that the three letter agencies are not going to be combing through Anthropic's customer list and assessing for fraud and foreign bad-actors. If you lie, they'll probably catch you eventually and most people are not stupid enough to lie about their identity to the US government and think they'll get away with it forever.
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
Minimum spend/fill is US$2 plus Chinese vat (dunno why but not gonna complain about 6%)
It feels to me as good as the last version of Opus I was using (I think 4.6 or 7?). I'm going direct through the DeepSeek API, not Openrouter.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/skrabe/tweakcc-fixed https://github.com/skrabe/lobotomized-claude-code
At first I used this shell script here:
https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...
Someone posted it on HN on the Opus degradation thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
I just kept using it to fix the prompts for a long time. Eventually I asked Claude to port it to Python to make it easier to maintain. Now every month or so Claude dissects the Claude Code binary and integrates the script with the newest version.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/%7E/.lo...
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.
either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too
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.
This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.
They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model.
Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.
Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.
It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.
I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done.
I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...
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.
i disagree, but it seems clear, from how you put it, that there's no point explaining the why
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
1. Anthropic certainly has the ability.
2. They’re willing to use it silently.
Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
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.
In Reddit's case it means you can continue to post and comment, it's just that your posts and comments are no longer seen by others.
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.
I see you have an uncommon name.
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.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
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.
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.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
They know who you claim 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.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
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?
E.G> when Taylor Swift wants to call Apple right now, how would she know what number to call?
Incidentally, https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-...
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.
It goes something like this (it varies by country / citizenship): first you upload a picture of your ID, then you use your phone to take a video of your face, then the two are matched. A failure is when the uploaded ID doesn’t match your face.
You can’t get to the part where they don’t match without uploading a picture of their ID. If you don’t have their ID, then you can’t fail to match. If you fake the ID, then when they come to upload their own ID, their ID won’t match your fake ID and they won’t be blocked.
You do not need real documents if your goal is to get the person locked out by using fake documents.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't AI supposed to solve this? /s
Turns out it wasn't dogfood.
I then looked at their age verification and it used that problematic company so I cancelled out.
Why on earth not?
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
They could have vibe-coded their own verification system that uses DC APIs. It shouldn't take long, assuming that Anthropic still has access to Fable. /s
what did you do to trigger a verification process?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> At this time, retries are not supported. You can continue using OpenAI’s platform with your existing access.
That's ridiculous, especially as their list of reasons that verifications can fail include "There was a technical issue during submission".
Why would they care about _you_ when they have just a bit short of a billion users and they are up for a huge IPO? Of course they won't even bother implementing a retry.
Indeed, that's what motivated me to get an OpenRouter account!
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.
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.
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:
"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1
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.
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.
Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners.
The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.
That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers.
The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1].
Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC.
> not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet.
[1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically
I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.
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.
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.
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.
To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_iv...
Edit: truthbe above pointed out there was a privacy policy change.
The updates were for the appeals process.
https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...
There was, however, also a change to the privacy policy, effective July 8, 2026. See https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o... It now says:
"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."
The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.
An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.
2. Verification Data. As part of our efforts to ensure the security of our services, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. We have described what information we collect and how we collect it.
And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.
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.
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.
Or they won't. They're not Facebook.
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
Not it's not. Evil companies like to do business together.
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 Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.
If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.
If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.
There’s a lot of individual actors in china, just like the US, but as a whole they take a “country” approach.
I’m not condoning this, just speculating.
They’ve had this process in place for a long time.
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.
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.
Im really not sure why anyone would spend 15k to run local llms. The models you'll be able to run (70b) param models will be incredibly underwhelming.
Is this assuming no price increase and no throttling ?
On a side note I have been playing around with local LLM and while it works, the speed is the bottle neck for me.
Codex is a product of OpenAI.
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 :)”
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
Flock (YC S17)
Flock is a Y Combinator company.
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.
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.
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.
Seems to be working for every other AI company.
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.
This is what I don’t really get about the AI discourse… I don’t have any reason to think this is all a veneer over capitalism. We don’t know what goes on in their head but the track record of the cofounders of Anthropic is quite honest so it feels like a conspiracy theory to suggest they are purposefully getting themselves nationalized when the simplest answer is that there is real documented concern on AI safety risk
I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
Assuming they won’t trade or sell it back to the US or whoever?
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"
How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.
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.
I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
Kids have been defeating these smile and close your eyes things using photo mode in video games to control a character to perform the actions.
This help page has been there for a long time. Long before Fable was announced.
Their ID process isn’t new.
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.
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.
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.
I'm rooting for China here, feels strange but well
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.
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> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner
See this related thread regarding Persona:
OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 - Feb 2026 (206 comments)
The company that already had a data breach incident & has ties to palantir. Also used by OpenAI to ensure you can't escape it.
Now we just need to tie this in with Sam's eyeball scanning tech for maximum dystopia vibes
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.
Seems like the old Linux FUD to me.
I have no idea about Persona though.
This should definitely be a concern for any Claude user, especially given the open corruption of the current US administration.
If that alone doesn't concern you, everyone should also remember that Anthropic has accidentally released their own source code multiple times at this point.
Why should anyone believe they are going to handle your personal data with any more care than their own?
Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
I'm really struggling to get a handle on your position here. You appear to be arguing the worst positions from both sides of the debate around AI at the same time. If you're claiming the future is here and it is deeply stupid then we're in violent agreement.
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
San Francisco Bay Area, CA Los Angeles, CA Metro Phoenix, AZ Miami, FL Orlando, FL Dallas, TX Houston, TX San Antonio, TX Nashville, TN
I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?
While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?
Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
Still feeling chippy over there I see.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
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?
100/s*month*(.14/million) = $37
A decent deal but Flash is quite dumb and you still have to pay for output tokens
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.
This website is so out of touch with reality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?
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.
> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguards
Since I read I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245), I, somehow, start feeling very uncomfortable with ID verification as it appears there are actually many players processing my personal data, not just Persona.
Fortunatelly its all just secuiry theatre so no one cares.
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.
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.
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.
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)
...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.)
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.
Corporate accounts, in the US, will have full personal identification through the corresponding company's HR.
But that's obviously just a speculation.
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.
So, I'd be careful calling Wise a "UK bank", as that gives the wrong impression.
More info about how Wise UK works: https://wise.com/help/articles/4IusAofIppsIGPcs7sEIXI/how-ou...
chuckling in slightly mischievous British
Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?
So maybe Persona has developed tools for this specific form of eligibility check?
(I believe some EU countries do have digital attestation tools?)
>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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.c...
So this isn't new right?
But hold on, collateral to what? Is this "our own personal jesus" access that we cannot live without or what?
People don't and cannot learn how to code or what? We don't know how to think?
I am calling their bluff. Fill your own gddam datacenters with "meaning".
Panta rei.
So, in the end, it was just another mass ID grab by Persona? This also doesn't look like how EAR stuffs were handled.
We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
Never been a better time to use local models.
Also Anthropic:
Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.
Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.
How is it always the same company doing the verification too?
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.
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 if Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.
I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.
So an expired ID is not verifiable in the same way a fake one isn't.
1. Force KYC is US LLM providers, gleefully supported by the US LLM providers.
2. Next -> now Chinese LLM providers must use KYC in the "free market" Western world.
3. But we can's allow KYC information to go to China, can we?
4. Now Western customers can not access Chinese LLM
5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.
there are tons of US providers supports Chinese models. Chinese labs give them weights, they don't give back user info in return.
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.
As said - YOU have become their product. I call it slavery.
Anyone still wondering who really is pushing for mandatory age sniffing on computers? We are seeing the whole picture slowly now. AI is a huge scam - it is all against humans.
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).
Photo ID is a real person (your hotel maid took photos) iPhone headroll is generated to match the real photo ID with AI.
Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?
Maybe I just don't understand the definitions?
Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
It seems there is no way for a high school student to use Claude for any purpose, including as part of a supervised project or class.
Shit now i have to cancel my account
Though considering how many americans dont have passports its will be like shooting themself in a foot.
"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."
What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.
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.
Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago
I do use it more these days, and it has helped me get a lot of grunt work out of the way, but I do noticeably realize it's killing my cognitive software engineering abilities.
It bothers me at many levels right now.
That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.
How could they do that ?
This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.
We knew that from the start.
I think Anthropic should explain why they're doing this particular partnership.
Seems like it upgraded to doxxing its entire userbase.
"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"
"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"
Right.... So training a better facial recognition model improves their ability to prevent fraud?
> Persona ... cross-references your information against trusted third-party databases.
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).
I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.
Fortunately they are Anthropic and so as the name tells, they will care about humans. And so we can trust them they won't try to push agendas that require constant propaganda to be accepted, since it never happened before right?
De platforming, debanking, misinformation, hate speech, anyone?
We use "who you are" mainly for banning you from the system for life, so you'll never be able to AI program again and will have to leave the industry because some arbitrary decision by some grunt at Anthropic decided you were in breach of something, with no path for review or justice.
See, it's all fine!
It's not
Realistically this is a "who cares" for me. It represents very little if any incremental privacy loss.
The only question left is which countries will have access or if it will be USA only.
A. This brings responsibilities on using these super powerful models like fable and mythos.
B. Distillation attacks can be avoided as someone who does it can be perma banned
C. Brings value to having an American passport, AI benefits all the world equally but it's built on American talent and capital. There should be some value to people who are not shareholders.