An outstanding idea. Those lobbying for age verification hate it though, because they want to be the arbiters of age, and all that juicy PII that they can analyze and resell.

I'm not so sure. I think the push is from the government actually. But companies are not exactly opposed to it. Quite the contrary. Big corporations see compliance as a moat. Tobacco companies supported stricter regulations on tobacco advertisements, because they had the deep pockets required to follow the changing laws. Mr. Altman is all-in on AI regulation, because it will mire down competitors while OpnAI has already "slipped past the wire" and done all their training pre-crackdown. When given a choice between regulating their industry (platforms and operating systems) vs regulating someone else's (porn sites and the like) they'll always helpfully "volunteer" to be the first to be regulated. It's just good business.