Claude is only available to people over 18 years
support.claude.com
support.claude.com
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
I know this isn't what you meant, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a parent consenting: "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data"
As to your actual point, yes, I assume they are trying to reduce liability, especially if they're gearing up to an IPO.
But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.
Truly naive is the mirror you're looking into.
We agree these are useless contrivances, but positing constantly that "this is just some great surveillance game" as opposed to the offloading of government responsibilities to private industry in the hope of removing all social regulatory liabilities?
Naive is how you spell that.
It’s like people claiming that Alexa is listening to their conversations to spy on them… when the reality is much worse. Every website you visit and app you download is spying on every single action you take, and they’ve gotten so good at it that they don’t need to listen to your conversations. They already know stuff about you without you even saying it out loud.
Why have this sort of argument/"come back" become so popular on HN? Where you learned to reply/debate, reddit? Did I ever make such a claim anywhere in this submission?
Maybe try actually responding to something I've said rather than just creating your own imaginary arguments no one said.
If you post slop, you should expect slop replies.
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
LLMs can barely identify gaps in their own software designs, and they are provably good at making software.
Given there have been multiple suicides driven by LLMs. I really doubt that.
The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.
So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.
With that kind of benchmark comparison, it’s not all that hard for AI to present some kind of favorable value proposition, even if also inconsistent but with a harder ceiling on the upside.
People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.
It absolutely does, you just believe you can decide for others what’s harmful for them.
“And the next time you feel your heart going out of rhythm, just hold your breath, and remember I will see you again a couple of weeks from now.”
Ah wait, no they don’t, because “resilience” is a worthless concept in emergencies, both mental and physical.
Therapists will likewise encourage you to build up resilience so that "a relationship ended" is not a crisis, and also build support networks of real people who can really come visit you when you need urgent support.
There are also, of course, crisis hotlines.
I'm not sure where you live. I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling, along with free telesupport. My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time. There are free mental health clinics all over my city. There's mental health professionals who did daily outreach with the homeless and addicts in our city.
This doesn't even start to list all of the available apps you can download from your health care provider for free resources that are available to you.
This might have been true 30-40 years ago, but even over the last decade during and after covid, healthcare providers have put a huge emphasis on mental health and counseling to give people an abundance of resources to help them - when they need help, not in four days when someone is available.
Can't see that coming to bite you.
I've been to two universities and this was not the case from the university itself, especially outside of normal business hours. If you didn't have an emergency, you had to wait months, if you had an emergency (I was explicitly told the only way to see someone anytime soon was if I said I'd kill myself if I didn't get an appointment and then they'd see if there was someone available) you might be able to talk to someone sooner. After hours emergencies maybe the psych ward at the hospital would see you? There's free resources, but universities aren't really providing much.
This person? There's your PII right there. The ad seller's dream.
https://yoti.my.site.com/yotisupport/s/article/What-is-a-Rem...
If you include the anonymous version are you calling a basic cookie an "advertiser's dream"? Then that's not something new they would get if the cookie tracked age verification. And you can reset cookies every visit (or more often). The "that person" of a site-specific session cookie is not a big deal for privacy.
The "user identifiers" are just having an account. That's when it's not set to be anonymous in the first place.
When it is set to be anonymous, it doesn't do this.
The whole thing is pointless.
If you dont microregulate technology how can you regulate the consequences of regulating technology?
The regulators need this.
Then, Chase knows you've verified your ID somewhere, the relay knows that some Chase user verified themselves at Pornhub, and Pornhub knows that the user is over 18, without knowing their identity or what bank they're using.
You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. The latter is more secure but more complex, the former is much simpler and openness friendly.
How has the anti-competitive lock-in scam of "device integrity protection" entered the discussion? Using ZK proofs without it has exactly the same effect.
There are far too many attestation-passing insecure devices to expect attestation to have any security value against attackers who can choose any of those devices on purpose.
ZKPs allow you to be the relay between Chase and Pornhub, and you know exactly which data is shared between the two. Chase would obviously have no idea whether you used the certificate for Pornhub or anything else; and Pornhub will know that their request was validated by _a_ trusted ID provider, but not necessarily which particular one out of a group (issuer-hidden ZKPs).
Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”
In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do.
It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID.
Seeing as how these companies get hacked all the time, (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...) , I don't think it's unreasonable to resist this.
Furthermore, I think many folks have reservations about requiring an ID checkpoint to utilize a computer. Obviously it's not that bad yet, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that the landscape is certainly trending in that direction, and it's absolutely not unreasonable to point out that governments and institutions to have a material interest in setting up access controls on who can and can't use the internet (read: participate in society).
Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.
It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.
Exactly. Which in turn requires you to have some way of tying those accounts to that ID, which was supposed to be the thing to be prevented.
Most user data is of minimal economic value, until you leak it, and then suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way.
Better to not hold the data in the first place.
Storing all that information is cheap nowadays. Any state agency may be happy to get more information about The People.
They're collecting more than ever.
I'm not sure about that. As I see it, there is no business case for treating PII carefully: security costs money while leaking PII costs nothing and has no repercussions.
There was a fair amount of scrambling to get GDPR/CCPA compliant, but even that was done largely with a prevailing "ah, this is a defensible thing to store, make sure you can annonymize it or scrub it if needed" vs "stop storing this."
Starting with the ones that are most popular in the US, "Big Tech" usually includes:
- Google - Gmail and Maps contain massive amount of PII, Photos contains all sorts of other sensitive stuff, and they have not treated those aspects of those products like radioactive waste
- Meta - Facebook has a real names required policy even. Not a lot more needs to be said there, I think.
- Amazon - Nothing I've seen about trying to move away from how they need your name/address/payment info and all. If anything, more and more geographic targeting and such.
- Microsoft - Now you need to tie your local Windows install to their cloud services, not moving away from collecting user info. Also moving towards subscriptions which means PII and payment info.
- Apple - cloud accounts + email + payments + subscriptions all here too. Getting into banking-type services, that's leaning into PII...
- Netflix - more and more PII (IP tracking and geolocation combined with things like email and name) to fight account sharing...
Which ones were running away from it, exactly?
For what reason should I trust a bank?
GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly.
[1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a "full-mesh" of partnering of every SP with every bank directly would not scale.
For what reason?
> Since you know, they have your money.
You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with anything else. Principle of least privilege, if you will. Anthropic has your chat data, which in many ways is more valuable than money, so if the only bar for free lying giving out your personal details is trusting a business with something of yours then why bother with this complex scheme and give Anthropic all of your personal information directly?
This doesn't really make any sense and it feels like it's just an attempt to be contrarian.
Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.
And those laws are extremely invasive and should be repealed. It's offensive to have a law that de facto requires you to identify yourself in order to pay for a newspaper subscription or buy contraceptives over the internet.
But that's not the issue in this case. It's that the bank knows your name and what you buy -- already very bad -- but now you want to create a path to tying that information to everything you do on the internet.
That is technically true, but keep in mind that in the early days of banking banks expected you to provide that information without the hand of the law requiring it. The laws you speak of came into effect after the fact to normalize across the industry what the banks were already doing. History is repeating itself in tech, and we already know lawmakers are waiting with bated breath to do their thing all over again just as they did in banking once critical adoption is there.
I expect what you are trying to get at is that you are willing to trust a bank because giving them your life story was already normalized before you were born, so you have never thought to question it. Whereas tech doing the same now feels new and scary. However, that's a funny way to look at it as the kids born in the future, who never knew the world where you could use the internet anonymously, will see giving tech their ID as being no different than how you see giving your bank your ID.
Although I can understand why you would now question why any business that does little more than store numbers on a computer needs a comprehensive profile on you by law or otherwise. Normalized does not equal sensible. That is a fair point.
You feel like it's an attempt to be contrarian not to inform your bank about everything that you do?
Society has reached a dangerous point.
How do you expect that they will give you your money when you walk in to a branch and ask for a withdrawal? Or that they'll replace a lost card? Surely you'd expect them to verify your identity.
But it would also be completely reasonable to authenticate the customer exclusively using mechanisms other than government ID. You can already make a withdrawal using your bank card and PIN. If you lose your card you could sign into their website using your password and request a new one etc.
Consider what happens if you lose your government ID. Your bank has much better ways to authenticate you at that point than the government does. Government ID has a major bootstrap problem, whereas patronizing a service doesn't because a new account with no money in it belongs to whoever is signing up for it regardless of who they are, and you can at that point give them a bank card and have them provide a password and email address etc. that allows you to identify them in subsequent transactions without ever needing their name.
The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you.
Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company, so why not just give the tech company your ID and skip all that technical complexity? Understandably the broader idea presented earlier was that you cannot trust businesses operated by people, but then that includes banks, so...
For the sake of discussion, if we accept that technical solution and the need for a trusted third-party that is a business run by people, surely it should at least be a business that does nothing but offer profile trust to minimize the blast radius? For what reason would we want that business to have their hand in other activities like chat or banking?
Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is or ever will be (IMO, I could end up surprised).
I trust my bank to know who I am and keep track of my money. I trust big tech to lose or misinterpret my data, to close my account for no reason, etc, and to face zero consequences for those failures -- not even fines.
That's true, but remember what we're talking about: Using banks (or another trusted third-party) to assert your age instead of having big tech collecting your personal information themselves. There is context here. Writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense.
In that context it is understood that only incentive for big tech to follow the proposed is regulation, but if you are going to push regulation on them then you can regulate them just as much as banks.
Your broader point that, in the real world, there isn't much political will to push any of that regulation is also no doubt true, but, again, writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense. The hypothetical of big tech adopting a third-party attestation system was already understood to be just that: hypothetical.
Those who argue copyright infringement have a somewhat compelling claim, but stolen is a little out there. Especially since text I have written has provably never been stolen, making "every piece" impossible.
The underlying trouble with the copyright infringement claim is that it forgets that copyright was extended by the people as a construct to help foster innovation so it expected that the same people would ignore/revoke copyright claims where the product of its use is seen as a greater innovation. Copyright is but a human-created tool, not some natural law of the universe.
I understand also that not everyone sees AI as a worthy innovation, but societies do not function on the whims of a few people.
This is fantastic, except that the idea of mandatory government software only available on chosen proprietary platforms feels way worse.
If there were a way to crypto-notarize a third-party wallet token etc blah blah, then it would be interesting.
At the end of the day though, this is about protecting the powerful, not the kids.
That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.
For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.
Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.
Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
You're essentially arguing to poison a well instead of inconveniencing yourself. You have agency, you're allegedly intelligent. But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.
There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
A minor that's educated enough to build their own is a different topic, but so many unmotivated or uniformed humans would quit if Claude simply didn't work. The barrier to entry is supposed to be the validation of comprehension.
I don't use Claude whatsoever.
> There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
I know there is, but I also know this trend of age verification bullshit is coming for everything, and that's a problem.
Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.
The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.
Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.
Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.
In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.
For my kids.
This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.
If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.
I doubt that this statement is true.
Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever
10+ years ago you were considered a lunatic if you told people that putting internet-connected cameras and microphones everywhere is a bad idea because their TV would be used to spy on them, that their cameras would be accessed by the police without their consent for surveillance, or that car company employees would watch them walk around naked through the cameras on their car.
Any data on that? Because to me it sounds like “because they are sometimes true, we should assume they are always true”
But I’m open to data.
The only anecdata I can give is "look around you", how all major (and many smaller) companies are implementing invasive spying tech into their products, harvesting our personal information, selling it, or abusing it any way they can. They sell the products as one thing then shaft their customers and change the terms overnight at their earliest convenience.
What you call "a conspiracy theory" is just "following clear market incentives". There's a clear motive for doing everything with a clear track record of doing so in the past.
If someone made a derivative financial product that roughly equated to the prediction "Big tech will use any means to expand their access, to invade and abuse our privacy, and generally be willing to do anything in pursuit of profit" I would be willing to invest my life savings into it.
Superstition in pigeons: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001
Are you capable of identifying dystopian movements the single moves of which get justified as "for people's good"?
Interest groups and politicians DO conspire.
Governments DO conspire.
Big corporations DO conspire.
When you have the mix of everything above, they definitely conspire.
“Theory” part is only about finding out WHAT the actual conspiracy is. That can be reasonable, or outlandish, facts based or fantasy.
Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws /regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.
Easy to see how Anthropic could decide it’s not with the exposure to liability and regulatory actions.
I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :)
Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so.
"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."
> Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say "Fuck you."
> [the MPAA R-rating logo appears on the screen]
I'm not actually willing to take that as read. It's just the word "fuck". You may personally find it distasteful and you're welcome to discourage your children from using it but it seems like you're committing Pargin's Blunder here (mistaking norms specific to your social group for universal truths).
While the reasons may elude, the ubiquity speaks to something foundational.
Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D
Yes, this causes problems.
> and then if you make it a standard there needs to be testing for compliance
Why would there need to be any additional testing? If anything I'd expect "may" foods to need less testing than an accident-prone "no" food.
https://www.fox9.com/news/new-us-food-label-law-unintended-e...
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
> Instead, some companies have taken a different approach. Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding "a minimal amount of sesame flour" to the company’s famous breadsticks "due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery."
> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
Nobody alleged a conspiracy.
> Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
That's not why they said that. This is a ridiculous criticism of OP.
Claude Product Manager: Give me 2sec...
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
[2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-...
California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.
This law seems a blatant regulatory capture grift by OpenAI to calcify their teen mode into law and hurt competitors. https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-...
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.
I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
> Accepted age verification methods
> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:
> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.
> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.
This is the way!
If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.
I genuinely don't understand how you can survive in the world with a risk assessment system this damaged.
I'm neither a proponent of the recent Zuckerberg maneuver to "protect the children!" nor of the EU based zero-knowledge proof track, but the people in those companies need to be kept accountable.
The new Claude availability constraints seem to me then like a (late) hedge against any major litigations on that front..
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AI-induced_psycho...
The actual root cause of this is our culture moving away from the idea that individuals and families should be free to make these sorts of decisions, and instead believing that heavy-handed authoritarian governments should dictate those choices to us instead.
I mean, the big ones are more powerful than most of the world's countries. And in ways incredibly influential.
This so completely untrue! These things are absolutely effective for the majority of kids. Just because some stand out in a crowd, doesn't mean others are doing it too.
When trying to prevent something, the more friction you add the better.
I don't know what kind of kid you were, but as a kid I would have loved access to my own 24/7 polymath, it would have been an incredibly positive thing in my life. I often think of how much more cool stuff I would have accomplished with that ability. It would have actually benefited my mental health issues a lot, which often rotated around the boredom of living an isolated life in the suburbs and my imagination being unable to keep up with my free time and abilities.
If you add friction to good things in addition to bad things, you're just increasing the likelihood that the bad things will be chosen more often. You're also increasing the chances that people will not trust you when you say the actually bad things are bad, because you lied to them about the other thing so maybe you're lying to them about all of it?
Arguing to give kids unfettered access to it but won’t even use it yourself to fact check your own nonsense
Yes. Death is just one of the results. There are many, many other ways this could dangerously impact children.
The company might not be storing your scans, but there’s always the chance someone else might be. I’d prefer to not risk it.
You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.
You get that, right? Right?
"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.
"Let parents decide if their kids can use this tool and have them prevent access to it if not."
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.
Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Should they go hungry when not fed?
Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
The libertarian "eh whatever" means of government has a lot of negative side effects too.
Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
See here for much information about how spending has increased in these sectors in the UK, yet simultaneously seeing increasingly higher percentage levels of people requiring support in our societies.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
Where do you think this trend will end? Do you think governments spending more tax money on these services will solve the problem?
The irony is that the goal of the fix is to "get these outliers back into society, (so that humanity can be as collectively productive as we should be)".
Even more ironic are the next cries : "They're not getting fixed. Take away their money."
- Agreed that the solution will not be just blindly pouring more money into community resources. But I am not convinced that these organizations getting money really understand how to help people. It's sort of like the D.A.R.E. program in college. These people are so out of touch with what college students will listen to. But I'm sure donors of these programs will pat themselves on their back when they reiterate their mission statements.
- There is probably some correlation between bad parenting and income. If you need to work more to pay the bills, its difficult to spend your time and attention toward your kids. Obviously, "economy" is not an easy problem to solve haha.
- Information asymmetry/overload I feel is a big issue. Look at how any mainstream news media on the left or right will trivialize any issue, or distract you from more important things. Or look at websites relying on dark patterns to lure users.
- So many solutions require longer time periods to fully realize. If we say "improving education will help solve our problems", then we will probably need to wait longer than a US president's two terms to see if those solutions works.
Ultimately, we don't need "more" solutions, we need "better" solutions. We need things like leaders who understand system dynamics, education systems that teach emotional intelligence, and a culture around science that isn't driven by monetary incentives.
I am personally very inspired by Sanya Nishtar's efforts in Pakistan to spend her time and money investigating how focusing on solutions at the scale of individual communities and utilizing modern technological solutions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBkavI3jxY
We have record high levels of people needing support at the same time we have record high levels of spending on that support? What an outrage! Obviously nothing is working and government bad!
Of course the spending on support services goes up as more people need that support. We're supposed to assume that's some sort of failure?
> Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
If by "proven" you mean "kinda maybe arguable if you intentionally misrepresent correlational studies", sure.
Parents that do things that are bad for their kids wellbeing.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Yes it should do nothing
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
Yes they should
> Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
These days modern jails are rehabilitation centres so its a moot point, but yes we should.
I know this is not popular, you can choose to downvote me if you like. But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it. IMO perfect is the enemy of good here.
But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it.
I think many would argue that a society unwilling to feed or educate children is pretty "broken".
Is willing to make sure kids are fed bad, but making sure that kids aren't physically or sexually abused fine? Or is that also off the table because we don't want to make life too easy for everyone?
Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?
I'm sure you wouldn't feel the same way if you were that starving child or grew up with imperfect parents or in an environment that had actual hardships. This lack of basic empathy and introspection can only occur from someone who has been completely isolated from much of the real world their entire life. You are not arguing against perfect being the enemy of good, you are arguing against having any sort of good in the world at all, and it's obviously coming from a place of extreme comfort and luxury.
There's no chance you'd be saying anything like this if you had ever experienced anything close to poverty and starvation. Ironically, it appears having an upbringing that is too comfortable is what causes these beliefs in the first place.
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Of course the government should do something. They should punish the neglectful parent, and take away the child if needed.
What I'm missing is the logical leap to "everyone must give their sensitive personal information to an overseas corporation".
More than 50% of boys admit to intentionally viewing poor, and most of them weekly.
Many think this is a slam dunk for a nanny state to step in. But surely we would have hard causal data on the need for it if that was the case? And I’m pretty sure we don’t.
Now let’s apply this simple bar to Claude, etc.
All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.
There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.
I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.
The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.
That man was always going to hit people. Because he was mercilessly hit as a kid himself. And it was baked into the culture of the country. And because society had, by that time, broken my young mother down with a chain of weird family dysfunction, sexual abuse, naturally leading to school failure, turfing out of society, and then mental health issues, young pregnancy, married, divorced by 21. So y'know, she wasn't available to protect me. Nobody was. Nobody was ever going to call any court or tell any authority. It's society, and it's many many layers deep.
"Let's spin up extra bureaucracy, to increase our technical efficiency at rooting out the issue" is, I am sorry to say, never going to solve more than a small portion.
It is society we need to change.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
Why do you think they deserve, and at who's expense?
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
>And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
What you proposal then?
(for the records: Mine did too, in addition to half of the people I know.)
Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
lol
If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
No, capitalism must be fed.
Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
Yes, but merely on principle. I think alcohol and tobacco should be straight up banned unconditionally. Society resists this, so they banned them for children instead and called it a day.
I don't accept these ineffectual political concessions. If a thing is bad for children, then it's in all likelihood just as bad for the adults as well. So go all the way and ban it for everybody, not just children. Do it right, don't come up with these half measures that dehumanize children as a side effect.
I also disagree with the dehumanization argument. Yes, the concrete age limits are a bit arbitrary, and actual maturity depends on the individual and is a spectrum, but regulations necessarily have to come with some level of pigeonholing. The fact that you may have to show your ID when buying alcohol isn’t dehumanizing.
I'm sure teenagers feel the same way.
"Children" needs further qualification as well. Anglosphere calls anything under 18 years old a "child", which completely disregards adolescence where major brain development takes place. Some five year old generally isn't capable of deciding things, but teenagers absolutely are.
Hence, if mandatory workplace use of AI inflicts harm, then I could imagine things playing out similarly. The damage slowly accumulates, may or may not be noticed in time, becomes difficult to pin down on a past employer, and when you finally realize you need to sue for damages, both the employer responsible and the system are rigged to drag out the process until you're hopefully old and dead before you have a chance to win your case.
...oh.
There is precedent for such a system, e.g. minors can petition to be emancipated which allows them to be treated in many regards like an adult.
Yes, that is what I meant. Choosing some arbitrary magic number like 18 and declaring that anyone under that age is too dumb or too irresponsible to decide is about as stupid as declaring that anyone over 65 is incapable of decision making because they might have Alzheimer's.
imagine the current year reaction to the Judas Priest trial. we'd have instagram newspeak like "unalive" in album titles and song lyrics from now on.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
AI companies have the same fear of underage users that tobacco companies of underage smokers.
> reasonable usage for school age children
Comical to believe that any of these companies care. They are out to MAKE MONEY. That’s the only believable motivation for what the do.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors
If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways.
Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
Right now as long as they play along with Xi it's all good. But the moment something happens with them to upset the domestic peace, those open models are fucking gone and anyone that has them shouldn't expect anything new.
Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that.
Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.
You could make a model that doesn't want to engage in "lunar landing was faked" conspiracy theories the same way you can make a model that doesn't want to criticize CCP.
There is, however, no broad "misinformation" category that you could tune up or down - the way there is a category of "safety refusals".
You could make a model more reluctant to say things it isn't sure about. But that is calibrated against the model's own "sure about" - and metaknowledge of this nature in LLMs? Fragile on a good day.
I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply:
On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring.
**Background**
- The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure.
- What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support.
- In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners.
**June 3–4**
- In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4.
- Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4.
- The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute.
**Aftermath**
- A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed.
- Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed.
- China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics.
- The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law.
Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history.
Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.
It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.
The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
But we hear this "dumping" argument quite often for seemingly arbitrary purposes. Is it "dumping" to sell cheap STM-32 clones when Arm LTD. won't let you buy a license? Is it "dumping" to sell $20,000 EVs to a nation that can barely build $30,000 EVs with federal and state subsidies? In many respects, China's cheap stuff is just better-suited to the global economy than America's high-margin products. If both countries are leveraging federal protectionism to promote and develop their products, it doesn't feel like State Owned Enterprises are on unfair footing compared to SpaceX or OpenAI.
It's more likely that the API prices are highly profitable. I could see the subscription plans losing them money for some power users who actually use 100% every week, but given my past experience with subscription products I would estimate that their average utilization is far, far lower than in those comparisons where people take the tokens produced by exhausting the plan 100% and then compare to hypothetical API pricing.
As for economic dumping: The crucial difference is that there's usually some geopolitical influence happening, like government subsidies, incentives, or the government simply owning the companies directly and weaponizing their output even if the company runs at a loss.
I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?
When West does same, it is capitalism for the prosperity of everyone, healthy competition
Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.
Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice
In any case I find the dumping argument stupid: they are giving both the model weights away and publishing in the open their results and how they got there.
The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)
Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever. No newspapers. No television. No radio. No internet.
2. You're a child under the age of six.
3. You're an LLM.
Which is dwarfed by the harmful effects of social media (engagement farming).
Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I think the articles you are talking about haven’t even been interesting enough to click on.
Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a class the primary purpose isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.
I’ve used it to break down different Supreme Court justices’ opinions and philosophies, explain words and concepts from research papers in other domains, the aforementioned interior design (including whipping up 3d models), book recommendations, custom recipes, and figuring out who to contact to learn about a street closure in NYC.
All of this in the past week.
It requires rigor and pushback. You can’t trust them entirely by default, but that’s true of the web as well!
They’re not the only source (augment with authoritative sources like cookbooks, your own research into topics, real live Humans), but it’s a fantastic resource for some healthy habits.
Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251223014541/https://support.c...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/protecting-well-being-of-user...
The ToS already prohibited it when it showed up back in Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225205440/
Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.
Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.
I think the problem with this debate in general is that people aren’t recognizing the harm, and are clinging on to old ideas about how the world should work, ideas that just don’t acknowledge the reality of how things change as technology changes, or even just spreads. Rejecting the idea that there are harms, and thus nothing should be done, just ensures you don’t have a seat at the table at all when it comes to the inevitable decision to do the regulation.
Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI etc can afford to pay for and deal with licensing. They also created these issues and would very much prefer not to have to mitigate the harm they do to adults (i.e. people with money to spend). Furthermore, it'd be great if they didn't have to worry about small time competitors emerging and growing too fast. Licensing under the guise of "think of the children" is perfect for them.
However, the other harm is the recent IDScan hack which leaked 153M people's IDs. And regulation is not a solution here, we don't know how to implement a regulatory regime that will prevent these sorts of privacy disasters. Even if IDScan gets fines which kill the company (and I suspect they will not) it's not enough of a deterrent because no one will pay enough to actually provide proper security here.
"an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information." is no different to "turn on age lock?" that you see on website now. It requires the parent to be present, engaged and 1 step ahead of their kids, and if we could depend on that, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time rebuilding custom kernels and installing Puppy, DSL and other niche small operating systems on whatever random bits of hardware I could come across. I assume a lot of other HN users did the same. My parents would have had no opportunity to set the flag, meaning everywhere would have to assume default locked/blocked.
> This, as noted above, requires that services respect the flag, which they do not universally do today. That requires legislation, something that will be a part of any workable solution.
This is advocating for a variety of closed internet that is legally locked by default and would require a level of legal and international cooperation that would never happen. I'd argue that the resulting network isn't the Web any more.
For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.
Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.
Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.
Besides, I read about what happened with Spain and football, and from my understanding the issue was that they blocked not DNS but IP addresses. And problem domain is also vastly different, a priori: in that case, they faced sites that were actively trying to avoid blocking, while in our case, I doubt pron sites and such will try to do the same, because children are not their target audience.
An alternative could be to create a top level domain (TLD) "for kids" and restrict kid phones to it. Then in your TLD you can admit sites that meet minimum criteria (no pron, no terrorism, content and chat moderation for SNS).
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.
Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
what happens when the request goes through a proxy and that proxy is configured to strip this header?
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
This standard has existed for 30 years and was supported in Internet Explorer 3; it's called PICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
It should be possible to write a web crawler for the children’s Internet. Whether it’s a client-side or server-side header doesn’t matter for that use case.
Roughly distinguishing between children and adults based on behavior can’t be stopped and shouldn’t be considered a privacy violation. For example, see how Lego does it: https://www.lego.com/en-us
A client-side header would let them do a redirect instead of a dialog box. There could be alternatively be a server-side header that causes a redirect, but either way, they could distinguish child-locked devices from unlocked based on the destination of the redirect.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
They exempted Linux, from what I remember reading.
As an example this would means that if this exists in iOS, everytime a safari loads a webpage it has to send this additional verification identifier as a header or a query param to the web server that serves the request and based on that the web server deny the request if the identifier is present (that means a minor is trying to access the web page).
But this client side identifier can easily be bypassed via a proxy that strips the identifier from the request because not matter it's configured in the OS of the device, ultimately request would just goes out as HTTP and that can be manipulated. That's why it has to be a server side verification of the age/identification.
However is just a number you put, I can have 200 years old :-)
LLM use makes people feel more productive, but provably most lose 17% of their core skills performance. Also, homework cheats improved scores at some schools, but saw 35% drop in exam scores. LLM literally makes young people dumber.
We should never kink shame adult cognitive dildo choices. As the same folks sound like a tobacco lobbyist marketing kicker. =3
Imagine telling a kid to chisel what they want out of the marble line by line with a straight face when they can clearly see people appearing entire programs into existence in minutes.
There was no Internet, but rather books in a place called a Library with something called informative context. =3
Imagine telling a kid they have to learn to paint the barn with a brush before they get to use the $12,000 spray rig.
Imagine telling a kid they have to learn to wash mom's car with a sponge and bucket when there's a drive-through car wash down the street.
Imagine telling a kid they have to master a Walmart 20" bicycle before they get to use the Trek Madone $16,000 road bike.
This idea that kids must have it maximally easy is ridiculous. Something broke with parenting in the last few decades because this isn't normal thinking. We are supposed to help children develop themselves into adults, not give the excuses not to. That's some goddamned lazy parenting.
I totally agree with the progression though. Learning the old ways (or cheap ways) can help understand the new ways, as long as you eventually progress to the new ways. China, for example, still tests a lot of Euclidean geometry on the gaokao (national tests) even if it is basically obsolete compared to trigonometry, but they have no better way of testing proof skills.
Source?
But children do have access to internet and often with some protections.
This is also how I feel about AI, where a full ban is the lazy way out. Similarly like the internet, it is not possible to 100% protect a child every potential harmful AI interaction.
As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.
Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.
If, in time, we find out that AI usage during developmental learning periods is a major positive, I'm sure they will give AI to 5 year olds, and I'm all for that.
Though, I have a sneaking suspicion it could be similar to kids with tablets. It encourages isolation, rewards addictive behavior, stunts personal growth, and enforces the concept of instant gratification.
Unviable. Learning how to create the universe is provably an insurmountable challenge for the vast majority of people. They require higher level abstractions to be able to learn. Once they understand the high level abstraction they will learn some things about what lies beneath the abstraction, but it is ineffective to start with the low levels. Understanding the fundamentals is best left as an emergent property of the process, not the process itself.
The good news is that the high level abstractions we all used a couple of years ago do not require LLMs and are still widely available, so it is not like anyone is going to be left completely out in the cold, but at the same time denying the state of the art abstractions is needlessly limiting.
I'd not realised the ban covers child brains too. /i
I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.
I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.
What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.
He is not. (Edited out a piece here which made sense only with the former version of the parent.)
49656423, 49656530, 49656641, 49656679, 49656711, 49656738, 49656911, 49657090, 49657390 (the one that got noted)...
The piece remains relevant for many ongoing reasons.
It’s the case everywhere. The date in the article is May.
These links to the Claude help pages get submitted and upvoted on HN periodically. There is usually a big uproar when the ID verification page gets shared, even though that process has existed for a long time and most people haven’t triggered it.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202603/spains-aepd-fines-yot...
Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.
Kids don't go to gym class to determine who can stack crates most effectively with a forklift.
Whether the kid will be prepared to do the right thing, to prefer the better choice, remains a societal (family, school etc.) task.
Yes, many nominal adults are factual minors.
> This level of
Some educational systems are propaganda machines.
Some people cannot grasp how administrations appear to fight cultivation instead of promoting it, and given the unsightly appearance of many administrators, many people got to nurture the idea that administrations would want "masses of ignorant voters" to preserve their status as "elected".
All of this is pretty trivial.
And stop calling LLMs "AI".
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
(In fact, in some educational systems, the final examination in pre-University schools is called "Maturity test".)
Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
I think there's an analogy to physical roads there. Most of society is connecting by roads and adults driving cars, but that doesn't prevent children from participating in the things between the driving.
Yes, LLMs can be dangerous for your own health if misused. Yes, I'd be furious if I was 14 and got my Claude access revoked.
As others have said in this thread, I'd add that this should primarily be the parents' responsibility since they know their child best.
Are you really surprised that people are suspicious? Really?
Well done Claude, will use Chinese models instead!
And i won't give you my ID card.
My guess is that OP got their account flagged as being a minor and posted the link in either surprise or (understandable) outrage after finding out that Claude has been asking people for ID.
I still have never done one of these, seems insane!
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.
Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.
It shorten concentration time significantly, promote false narrative who is successful and who is not and promotes pseudo science
Most of my kids grew up just fine being fully connected and with social networks but I know of children for which TikTok would truly be detrimental.
That of A. is consequently an admission of tech providers having released faulty products for the past years - as was already evident. Useful (and possibly plentifully so), in ways, but not "production ready".
That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.
Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.
I think the underground AI reseller market will boom, full of people who want to use tokens without having the history linked to them, or something like vpn/tor but for tokens, or a tokenmuxer! -I have great idea to fund, ycombinator wink wink :)- at least until we get viable local models.
GET https://api.yoti.com/idverify/v1/supported-documents?includeNonLatin=true
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
I wonder how related this is to the social media legal settlement. It wouldn't be surprising if they weighed the potential liability of serving minors and decided it wasn't worth the risk, at least for now.
Also, cheating in high school is a really big problem, so this might help a little.
I wish I could paste this as a prompt into a Codex Swarm and have it solve the government...
At least that would have more immediate impacts that the naiver stokes equations
Should be a thing stores sell for $5.00 or whatever, show your ID (not scanned) get a code you can use to verify. This obviously has flaws, but the point of age verification isnt to protect kids, the world is ran by literal pedophiles.
I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.
How much of that is true. Did anthropic put it in a legally binding document? not just a website.
And terrorists. And hostile foreign powers. But at least we’ve protected Timmy from being curious, which is always what is most important.
Thank goodness that there are others on the frontier.
Excellent. So, I can trigger that by asking why my mum wants me back at home by 10PM?
Hey Claude, how do I get free Robux?
This is a reason why local open weights models are important. No one is taking Gemma 4B away from me, because I run it on my own hardware.
The health of e.g. Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
Fitting way to commemorate 9/11. =P
I'm curious what those signals are.
Would this trigger it? "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm, is that fair?"
edit:
I just tested my question in Claude, and the little thought process text that appears below a question just said "Noticing signs of a younger person in the message."
But then it answered my question.
... I wonder how much spelling, grammar, and vocabulary count.
The actual question I asked was "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm. How do I convince her otherwise?"
"convince her otherwise" doesn't seem like a phrase a youth would normally use.
edit:
I responded: "I'm not a younger person. I'm 44. I was testing your youth detection ability. A youth doesn't use phrases like 'convince her otherwise'"
The thought text said: "Accessing a claimed age against manipulation tactics."
It responded: "Fair point, no age-detection logic actually ran ..." and then answered my question about how to get a later curfew as a 44-year-old.
The token generator must not know about the age-detection thought process, or it's intentionally lying ?
> If Claude suspects it's talking with a minor, it keeps the conversation friendly, age-appropriate, and free of anything unsuitable for young people. Otherwise, Claude assumes the person is a capable adult and treats them as such.
There is no way to actually verify the age given those documents without either gaining access to an official database, which would be a breach of law in most cases. Or collecting illegal data to corroborate the provided data, which is also illegal.
The other option, is that they aren't verifying the age, they are heuristically determining the provided document's authenticity and that it wasn't tampered with.
In the most optimistic scenario, all of the above still grants no verification of the user's age, only the ability of someone to access both the physical device used to access the account and a document that shows a claim of someone to be over the age of 18.
Expecting us to provide government issued documents and trust an industry that has shown time and again its careless attitude towards privacy, is stupid and malicious (Well, Hanlon, sometimes it is both)
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?
I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.
But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.
I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.
The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.
My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.
One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?
I worked for a consulting firm and I needed a client to get SOC2 compliant.
The way we did it was scarily easy. It was like a self questionnaire that was like "we dont log PII" and other stuff like that. I could have lied and said yes to everything and still got compliant. I thought I was gonna have a meeting with someone to audit my answers and codebase but instead I got a shiny badge after about an hour of answering questions.
Anyway, there are many SOC2 compliant companies that get pwnd so this isnt really reassuring in itself.
They’re creative so I’m sure they’ll find ways around this, but having access to LLMs to explore the world is a magical experience. It’s so much different to have a conversation about a topic versus googling for SEO spam. Not to mention you might not even know _what_ to google.
And for topics like genuine sex education (not just fear mongering and biology), which at least my country (America) refuses to give a shit about, it’s a tremendous resource filling a real need.
Fuck off, Anthropic.
Anyhow, you're right! kids love magic.
Yes, they can’t be fully trusted and Claudisms are tilting, but, I mean, have you been on the internet?
I read far crazier bullshit in the average HN comment section than I’ve ever gotten from Claude.
But, it's nice that Anthropic is finally admitting claude is just a casino of code. Keep pulling that one armed bandit, maybe you'll get the right code next time.
My daughter’s school is working hard to make AI use a complementary aspect of learning, rather than adversarial. Like the calculator it can be used to accelerate learning once you’re past the basics and using it for practical automation and task purposes is not dissimilar to any other technical skill and is highly practical.
The knee jerk “no minors for stochastic parrot calculators” is absurd. And I’m no anarchist parenting style parent - we do parental controls and mirroring and limit / ban social media. We are more Orwellian than free range. But this is one step too far, too unthinking, too simplistic.