| ▲ | embedding-shape 7 hours ago |
| Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them? 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! |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner. "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." |
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| ▲ | brycewray 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Reminiscent of this scene from the 1981 teen-slasher parody, Student Bodies: > 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] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083133/quotes/ | | | |
| ▲ | freedomben 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Those are just compliance tits. 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 | |
| ▲ | erg0s4m an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Right this is exactly what happened with the new sesame laws. The government declared sesame as an allergen and enacted heavy fines if it was undisclosed. This lead to manufacturers adding sesame because they couldn't guarantee they were sesame free. | | |
| ▲ | Zak 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | "May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product. |
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| ▲ | forshaper 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've been using certain slurs as more proof-of-human, and any nuanced thinking that skirts by certain ideologies like Chechens hugging Russian artillery in 1995. | |
| ▲ | mrandish an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why not? We already need to include typos and misspellings to signal we're not an LLM. | |
| ▲ | superxpro12 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | and its 1 pixel wide. I propose the term pixtit | | | |
| ▲ | cineticdaffodil 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank. |
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| ▲ | egorfine 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID. | | |
| ▲ | londons_explore 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Whilst this is OP's point, the reality is the majority of big tech companies have been treating user data like radioactive waste for 10+ years. 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. | | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But then why do they want to sniff after everyone? Storing all that information is cheap nowadays. Any state agency may be happy to get more information about The People. |
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| ▲ | dgabriel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We don't want your static ID, we want where and what you are at this moment in order to better tune the algorithm. Your ID is frozen in time, so at any given moment, big tech knows more about you than the government does. IDs are only good for minimal verification purposes. | |
| ▲ | itintheory 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Whose cause? I think the government already has our IDs, given that they issued them. | | |
| ▲ | sicktriple 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The government isn't typically facilitating the check. In order to verify your age, you will be required to hand over your ID to a third party, who's privacy and security practices are likely: "Trust me bro." 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). | | |
| ▲ | itintheory 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right, I'm not a fan of the ID check or identity/age verification. I'm just trying to understand the conspiracy theory kind of idea that "they're trying to get all our IDs!!!1!!" sentiment. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "The government already has our IDs" is missing the correlation between the ID and the service. They know your face and your name but not what you do on the internet. The website knows what you do on the internet but it isn't tied to your name. It's the tying them together which is the problem. 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. | | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not possible to prove the user is anything ever. It probably never will be. Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID. Which is even more reason to reject ID verification. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID. 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. |
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| ▲ | jonathanstrange an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Governments don't necessarily have the connection between your ID and what you do online, though, and some governments are known to massively buy publicly available data from data brokers to circumvent existing laws. By "some governments" I mean the US government, by the way. That's not a conspiracy either, it's well-documented. |
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| ▲ | downrightmike an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Its actually to leak your gov't ID so data brokers can soak it up | |
| ▲ | estearum 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | QAnon for nerds |
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| ▲ | tsukikage 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves. The whole thing is pointless. | | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Pointless? If you dont microregulate technology how can you regulate the consequences of regulating technology? The regulators need this. |
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| ▲ | adamsb6 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | EU parliament gets bonuses? |
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| ▲ | phyzix5761 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bank? So now you know what bank they use? | | |
| ▲ | miki123211 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is why you have a relay in the middle. 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. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. 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. | |
| ▲ | deaton 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or we could use multiple relays so nobody knows both the bank and the purpose, or even who would know the other piece of data... and now thats just Tor but for identity verification. Might be a good idea actually, except the whole point is Anthropic wants to know who you are. |
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| ▲ | bitmasher9 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”. 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” | |
| ▲ | brainwad 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, they already know your credit card issuer, it's not that wild. Really Visa/MasterCard should offer age verification on their network... They have all the necessary components. |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The EU is also doing age verification by showing ID, only difference is that you have to trust that their zero proof concept works and they're doing what they say they do. In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do. | |
| ▲ | rivetfasten 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Colorado and a few other states have zero knowledge proof apps capable of this. 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. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do not want my computer to yield information to evil outside actors in general. This is why systemd going that way is so outrageous: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 | | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > from a trusted party like a bank. For what reason should I trust a bank? | | |
| ▲ | kees99 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money. 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. | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You (somewhat) trust your bank 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? | | |
| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other PII. 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. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you. 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. |
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| ▲ | dpkirchner 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other personal information. 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. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They could verify your identity if you've given it to them. 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. | |
| ▲ | win311fwg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, how do you expect a website to know that you are 18+? 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? |
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| ▲ | deaton 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I trust my bank a whole lot more than I trust Anthropic | | |
| ▲ | win311fwg an hour ago | parent [-] | | If I had a bank, I'd trust it too, it being mine. Most people don't have the luxury, though. In practice, they have to outsource banking to other people. And those other people are already quite likely to move around between both Anthropic and various banks in search of whomever will offer them the most economic benefits. It is not like a particular logo on their current business card is going to change their character. You do you, of course, you are already unique in having a bank you can call your own. But the fact remains that most people strongly believe that a person's trustworthiness is of the person, not the activity they happen to be doing at the time. |
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| ▲ | chrisjj 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" This person? There's your PII right there. The ad seller's dream. | | |
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| ▲ | sam-cop-vimes 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't. 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. |
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| ▲ | putlake 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From TFA:
Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance. Your selfie, document images, and any personal data are deleted by Yoti as soon as your age is checked. Anthropic never sees your ID or image; we receive only a pass/fail result and do not process or store any personal data from the verification. |
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| ▲ | jonas21 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway. [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... [2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-... |
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| ▲ | mikeocool 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers. 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. |
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| ▲ | brookst 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | And really the only upside to minor accounts is building loyalty, which is not nothing but also not the same as a paying customer. Easy to see how Anthropic could decide it’s not with the exposure to liability and regulatory actions. |
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| ▲ | alansaber 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick! |
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| ▲ | benbojangles an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1v6mgbs/comment/o... |
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| ▲ | password54321 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Damn, we hardly know who our users are No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things. |
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| ▲ | abirch 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals. | | |
| ▲ | miki123211 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most. People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next. | | |
| ▲ | burningChrome 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >> Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional 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. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time." Can't see that coming to bite you. |
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| ▲ | lmc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Decent therapists advocate for cultivating resilience for such situations. | | |
| ▲ | kbelder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So do decent parents and friends. | |
| ▲ | p-e-w 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Decent physicians do the same: “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. | | |
| ▲ | lmc 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The point is to try and limit what becomes an emergency in the first place. Having an argument with a spouse shouldn't necessitate an immediate call to a therapist. | | |
| ▲ | wat10000 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And adjusting a curtain rod shouldn't necessitate a call to 911 and an ambulance ride to the hospital, but sometimes shit happens. |
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| ▲ | thunderfork 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Decent physicians recommend exercise among other preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of emergencies. 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. |
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| ▲ | threetonesun 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do not have Bill Gates money but I think you're describing a friend more than a therapist. Finding anyone awake at 1AM is going to be hard, but even for Linus Torvald money you can find a therapist who will take a quick call in the morning. | |
| ▲ | rottenface583 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In the olden days in these and other situations, you hit the bar, got shitfaced, told your lifes story to a bottle and maybe banged a geezer/cougar that happened to be there. Something like that. | | | |
| ▲ | newswasboring 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The need is not in question, the solution is. This annoying glaze machine is not it for mental health tasks. | | |
| ▲ | nish__ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most people have friends and family to "glaze" them anyway. I don't see it as a major danger. Also, it's gotten better with the glazing lately anyway. | | |
| ▲ | hatsix 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The danger is in the replacement. Confiding in others builds a web of trust. Talking about a break-up with a friend builds a relationship, and the next time that friend needs someone, they know you're an option. It's economics, borrowing and trading emotional support. AI as confidant destroys that economy. |
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| ▲ | p-e-w 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tens of millions of people disagree with you. What makes you think you know better than them what is right for them? | | |
| ▲ | z0r 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It's OK for someone to believe that using an AI as an approximate therapist might be a bad idea, especially in light of the many publicly documented cases of AI feeding delusional thoughts and encouraging suicide. | | |
| ▲ | p-e-w an hour ago | parent [-] | | > This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It absolutely does, you just believe you can decide for others what’s harmful for them. |
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| ▲ | redsocksfan45 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth. | | |
| ▲ | officeplant 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth. Given there have been multiple suicides driven by LLMs. I really doubt that. | | |
| ▲ | tt24 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fascinating perspective - any technology that has caused >0 deaths is a dead end and has no chance of improvement. | | |
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| ▲ | newswasboring 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth. LLMs can barely identify gaps in their own software designs, and they are provably good at making software. | | |
| ▲ | duskwuff 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | LLMs are also incredibly poor at recognizing that they're "out of their depth", especially when their context is already full of their attempts to do something. |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In practice we know that LLMs have aided in suicide, so what they should do in theory doesn't matter. | | |
| ▲ | voakbasda 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | And how many people can it be credited for saving from self harm? Probably countless more than it has harmed, if I had to bet. |
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| ▲ | fn-mote 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another. | | | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | nekusar 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either. 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. |
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| ▲ | rixrax 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case. |
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| ▲ | drngdds 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think "we hardly know who our users are" is a problem any AI company is having lol |
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| ▲ | vova_hn2 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it! I doubt that this statement is true. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If it wasn't true before, it'll certainly appear to be true to Anthropic after this change, regardless if it's actually true or not in practice. | |
| ▲ | groundzeros2015 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Paying customers? | | |
| ▲ | icedchai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm sure many use their parents' credit card. In which case, the parent would do the "verification" and the minor uses the account anyway. |
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| ▲ | hobofan 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability. 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. |
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| ▲ | miki123211 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault. Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave." | | |
| ▲ | tt24 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | So in your example a microwave company should be held liable if someone puts a child in a microwave? |
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| ▲ | ozgung 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one. |
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| ▲ | trunnell 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I can tell you don't know anyone at Anthropic. |
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| ▲ | groundzeros2015 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem). |
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| ▲ | torginus 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap) |
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| ▲ | againstapples 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What would be gained with government id that would make this worthwhile? If people are already putting all their personal details into the LLM as well as all their work, do they really need id to know who someone is? Seems more likely they just want to avoid liability from all the child suicides? |
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| ▲ | ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin. |
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| ▲ | Dlemlo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What do you think is written on my credit card and my bill from Anthropic? Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so. |
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| ▲ | square_usual 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking. |
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| ▲ | hirvi74 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sometimes I have to double-check the URL to make sure I am not on Reddit. |
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| ▲ | bdangubic 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it! Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :) |
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| ▲ | gsquaredxc 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Even better: All of the under 18 users are probably on the free plan. It’s fairly likely that this demographic is disproportionately expensive. | |
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | 00deadbeef 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID? |
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| ▲ | kmoser 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you mean the part where it says they use signals to determine your age? |
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| ▲ | chrisjj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Claude Executive: Damn, schools are moving to teach the ill effects of our fake AI. How can we stop that? Claude Product Manager: Give me 2sec... |
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| ▲ | iamgopal 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen. |
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| ▲ | nprateem 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it! LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever |
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| ▲ | wangxili1997 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs. 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. |
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| ▲ | surcap526 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | cindyllm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network. This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community. |
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| ▲ | nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data. |
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| ▲ | Anon1096 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan. |
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| ▲ | TZubiri 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult. 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. |
