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!
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."
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."
Fear of a Black Hat, a rap mockumentary in the same vein as This is Spinal Tap, begins with a warning about the language in the movie that's essentially them repeating the offending words three or four times.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
No fucking way I’m sending my biometric data to some sleazy foreign company I know nothing about. The fact that “Yoti” is separate from Anthropic doesnt suddenly make this less gross.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.
I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.
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.
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.
you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?
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?
> you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?
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.
It’s wild how many people think that these tech companies are capable of some major conspiracy where they’re gathering and tracking user data for some unknown-but-nefarious purposes… while simultaneously also ignoring or even rejecting the reality that this has already been happening, for years.
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.
They certainly can't infer my full name and address from what I've used Claude for in the past, but if I'm forced to hand over
my ID and I do, then they would.
They infer your full name and address from the trackers baked into your OS, browser, phone, and every website you visit. They already have this. They’ve had it for years. They don’t need your ID for it.
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.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.
*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
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
> 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.
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.
There's a lot of myopic comments about children on HN, but this argument is so insane it's worth pointing out.
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.
> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...
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.
I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
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.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
Yes, except these kinds of fears related to big tech/surveillance end up being true more often than not. Unsurprising given the profit incentives and the total lack of ethics in the industry.
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.
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
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?
> Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
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.
Why do you want to add friction to teens having a creativity tool that can help them learn and build things?
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?
"Think of the kids!" OK but the impact of this technology shouldn't be underestimated and one doesn't only have to read up on the extreme ends. From personal experience, have you ever "chatted" with a model outside of technical/work related stuff? Both Anthropic as well as OpenAI models have been overstepping personal (user) boundaries for years now. There are multiple reasons for why Google hasn't capitalized on the transformer much earlier..
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..
They're absolutely doing this as a hedge against litigation, and given the trillion dollar lawsuits flying around, it's hard for me to blame them. Regulation by litigation rather than law creates ambiguous legal precedents that make it much harder to do business safely. That's why the most economically successful countries in the world tend to have the strongest rule of law.
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 actually disagree, I think the problem is that heavy-handed companies have been dictating choices to us and our children, in contradiction to existing laws, and people are finally saying enough, these companies need to follow the laws.
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> 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.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of 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.
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
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:
> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
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.
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
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.
Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.
I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports.
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.
My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
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.
Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.
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
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
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.
I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:
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.
I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero.
Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong.
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.
There are processes for teaching a model specific facts or specific behaviors. Including "respond to topic X with Y", if that's what you want.
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.
Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology.
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.
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.
This is not my experience at all. Obviously I have some different usage from a teen (I doubt they’re doing much interior decorating), but it’s really an incredible resource for learning.
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.
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
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.
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
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.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
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.
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.
Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits.
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.
Every day there is another story about the harmful effects of AI on literally everything, including mental health, IP theft, the climate, etc. "Think of the children" is and always has been a weak excuse.
I agree about corporations. But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws? They help ensure that the parents aren’t bypassed.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
> But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws?
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.
There is a trade-off between freedom and keeping people safe, and there is an argument for some level of personal responsibility. I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
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.
The point is the argument is invalid. Why is it that adults get to freely fuck their lives up? If it's bad enough to ban for kids, then it's probably bad enough to ban society wide.
"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.
If a law is going to treat 5 year olds differently from 50 year olds then a line has to be drawn somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than any other age you could pick.
The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would
still have to be made by humans.
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.
> perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc.
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.
Right, but in this case, exposure is a work requirement, which is a bit different. While an employer isn't going to require tobacco use, work involving asbestos exposure is still a thing (removal perhaps), and an employer knowingly or negligently requiring work activity without both risk disclosure and supply of proper safety equipment would face legal action.
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.
Indeed, and then there are dozens of grieving families from folks driven mad by LLM helping murder their children.
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
300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting
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 once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
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.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
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.
Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
I think the concern is a forced bit of functionality in all operating systems. It would quickly lead to a "and you need a license to sell your device so we can check that it can't bypass mandatory chuld-safety guards". Just like how some politicians are proposing mandatory licensing for releasing any AI model.
You need licenses for a lot of things though, particularly for things where there is substantial harm to be done when done incorrectly. This is just how it goes as things get more popular. Think back to 1903, there was no FAA then, but also no need for one. But it would be super disingenuous to argue now that airspace should be totally unregulated.
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.
Licensing for selling anything with a computer in it would cripple competition from small incumbents. They're mostly just regulatory capture for the established players that created the problem in the first place. Age restrictions are also an implicit statement that they are allowed to continue doing the same harmful things to adults.
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.
I think you need to explain the solution you're thinking of in detail.
"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.
He was saying, vendors put that flag in the OS and parents set that flag in the OS and internet services respect that flag from the OS. No website anything, all in the OS. No staying ahead of anything, one and done. 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.
I suspect that communicating a flag value of boolean true/false that "this computer is in use by a minor" from the operating system (via browser or app) to a remote SaaS service like something run by Anthropic will be seen as insufficient by the SaaS, so they'll necessitate ID-scan/live-selfie verification anyways.
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.
That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.
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.
An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
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.
Whenever I see people say "oh we should just get the ISPs to block it!" I wonder if they work at any ISP, or are just an end-user consumer of their services... As someone who does work in the ISP/telecom infrastructure sector my first reaction is hell no. I do not want US/Canadian ISPs to go down the path of what has happened with, for instance, Spanish ISPs DNS-blocking football related things as a result of court orders.
I am not, indeed. However as programmer I was sometimes told to do what the customer wants, even though it is complex or inapt. If this DNS blocking is inapt or misused, it's a political problem so let the citizens deal with it (I know this seems like wishful thinking given the current poor state of politics at least in the EU, but hopefully we will fix that while it's still in our hands).
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).
Apple verified me by the age of my account. Claude asked to use the age verification when I opened it on my iPad. Haven’t been asked for any other kind of age verification by Anthropic.
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
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.
I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
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.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
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.
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
> In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already.
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.
I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
I'm not telling anyone how to raise their children, companies have terms of service. When we can't accurately assess risk, the default we reach for is an age minimum (social media, alcohol, driving).
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.
> Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
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.
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.
Imagine telling a kid they have to learn arithmetic while there's a kid next to him with a calculator.
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.
Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
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.
"Minors" should have less agency than adults, but the state of "minor" vs adult does not follow the plain age. (And of course there exist many dimensions of maturity.)
(In fact, in some educational systems, the final examination in pre-University schools is called "Maturity test".)
It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.
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.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
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".
Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
Of course, having an at-hand tutor is paramount for learners in the formative age
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".
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
I don't configure my child's accounts as minor. I don't tell it is a child. The work I have to do to comply with different weird stuff when some platform knows a user is a child is so much crap that I get a headache! And it often does not work properly (eg try to signup child account for PokemonGo on slow device, or try to allow network play for a child in Minecraft game - microslop family crap will hit you hard)
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
Warsaw here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids connected to whatever social networks they want. The state will not be able to censor the internet for my kids.
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
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.
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
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.
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?
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.
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.
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 ?
That brings us back to requiring the user to present ID to the camera while doing a live-selfie, that would be a honest, belt-and-suspenders approach that's worth a look. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
Access to AI isn't a right (yet). Anthropic can choose who to sell it to, and if that's not you then bad luck. They don't need a right to do that; they can just do it because it's their product and they get to say who can buy it.
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.
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
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.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
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.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
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?
This is pretty sad. It’s like banning kids from the web.
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.
Magical like finding a house made of candy in the woods, or maybe more like that guy with the flute who solved the rat problem. Or maybe that guy selling magical beans?
Well I mean, I think we should thank anthropic, because they just spoiled what’s coming next for the AI companies, either provide an ID so can track you and what you type accurately and use it in retrospect in future if needed, or no access, even though you are using a credit card with same name!
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.
Glad kids can’t learn how to use AI effectively at school! Would only want them on laundered accounts to cheat, rather than official school accounts to learn the tools for practical purposes. That would be a real shame.
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.
> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
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?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.
I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.
i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google
Techbros: It's fine to demand ID verification for everything, except voting, because that's racist.
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.
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
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!
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."
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/
Took a bit of poking, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDQ5z7bNPs
Fear of a Black Hat, a rap mockumentary in the same vein as This is Spinal Tap, begins with a warning about the language in the movie that's essentially them repeating the offending words three or four times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmaaZtINRU
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.
and its 1 pixel wide. I propose the term pixtit
Also the Dixel for the male option.
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.
> or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"
It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID.
Whose cause? I think the government already has our IDs, given that they issued them.
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).
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.
"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.
QAnon for nerds
It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.
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.
Pointless?
If you dont microregulate technology how can you regulate the consequences of regulating technology?
The regulators need this.
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.
Bank? So now you know what bank they use?
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.
> 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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
> from a trusted party like a bank.
For what reason should I trust a bank?
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
I trust my bank a whole lot more than I trust Anthropic
> 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.
I can't figure out if you're joking or not.
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.
No fucking way I’m sending my biometric data to some sleazy foreign company I know nothing about. The fact that “Yoti” is separate from Anthropic doesnt suddenly make this less gross.
Right, Sending off my data to some random 3rd party company with far lower stakes does not make me feel better.
I 105 percent trust anything and everything a zillion dollar company promises!
Wasn't there a purported breach of a huge KYC service, idscan recently? https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/fbi-investigates-massiv...
Trust them, their totally vetted contracted third-party vendor retains all the good personal data for the taking.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
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.
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.
Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick!
>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.
I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.
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.
>> 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.
Decent therapists advocate for cultivating resilience for such situations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The need is not in question, the solution is. This annoying glaze machine is not it for mental health tasks.
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.
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.
Tens of millions of people disagree with you. What makes you think you know better than them what is right for them?
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.
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.
Honestly I could go for a mental health cougar right about now.
I don’t think they’re free either
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.
>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.
> 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.
In practice we know that LLMs have aided in suicide, so what they should do in theory doesn't matter.
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.
Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.
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.
I can tell you don't know anyone at Anthropic.
> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
I doubt that this statement is true.
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.
Paying customers?
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.
More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.
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.
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."
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?
Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin.
This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem).
And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.
I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)
It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.
Sometimes I have to double-check the URL to make sure I am not on Reddit.
Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID?
Do you mean the part where it says they use signals to determine your age?
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.
> 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... :)
Even better: All of the under 18 users are probably on the free plan. It’s fairly likely that this demographic is disproportionately expensive.
You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.
> 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
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.
> if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent
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.
Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.
Yeah I don’t think Anthropic is particularly interested in tracking individuals in the same way that companies like Facebook and Google are.
I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.
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.
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.
> I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything
You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.
you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?
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.
> you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?
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.
It's been a slow decline for about 15 years. It's as if the median age went from about 23 to about 15.
It’s wild how many people think that these tech companies are capable of some major conspiracy where they’re gathering and tracking user data for some unknown-but-nefarious purposes… while simultaneously also ignoring or even rejecting the reality that this has already been happening, for years.
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.
You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.
They certainly can't infer my full name and address from what I've used Claude for in the past, but if I'm forced to hand over my ID and I do, then they would.
They infer your full name and address from the trackers baked into your OS, browser, phone, and every website you visit. They already have this. They’ve had it for years. They don’t need your ID for it.
Yeah, surely assuming how some random HN user browses the internet never been wrong.
Haven't they reported "anonymous" users before to the police?
I don't know, how is that relevant to them asking for IDs now and also still not yet knowing my full name and/or address?
Can you source this? Seems believable but I haven’t heard it before.
Why would they need to do ID checks then?
Liability
It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data.
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.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.
*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply
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
> 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.
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.
There's a lot of myopic comments about children on HN, but this argument is so insane it's worth pointing out.
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.
> But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.
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.
> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...
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.
Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p
Of course, but it's also, with teenage years, the best years to learn tools.
The impact on ‘minors’ is even greater.
In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.
Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.
I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
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.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
Yes multiple companies in people's favorite acronyms.
Some people are just better pattern matchers
That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Yes, except these kinds of fears related to big tech/surveillance end up being true more often than not. Unsurprising given the profit incentives and the total lack of ethics in the industry.
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.
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
> for good or neutral reasons
Are you capable of identifying dystopian movements the single moves of which get justified as "for people's good"?
Hah, if anything does happen outside of expected conspiracy, it happens because two conspiracies just happenened to nullify each other's outcomes. Some of the people here even made some of the ridiculous choices that shape our lives today:D Just sayin'
there is no smoke without fire
“Suspicion is the same as fact”
I guess you could call capitalism a conspiracy theory if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that, yes, it exists.
Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?
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.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
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.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
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?
> Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes
Yes. Death is just one of the results. There are many, many other ways this could dangerously impact children.
> making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
Arguing to give kids unfettered access to it but won’t even use it yourself to fact check your own nonsense
> Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
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.
Why do you want to add friction to teens having a creativity tool that can help them learn and build things?
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?
Seeing what it’s done to my VP’s and execs I can’t imagine the damage it’s going to children smh
> we're not talking about a product that kills its users
Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.
Are you being sardonic, or can you seriously not tell the difference in harm between smoking cigarettes and Claude?
I genuinely don't understand how you can survive in the world with a risk assessment system this damaged.
"Think of the kids!" OK but the impact of this technology shouldn't be underestimated and one doesn't only have to read up on the extreme ends. From personal experience, have you ever "chatted" with a model outside of technical/work related stuff? Both Anthropic as well as OpenAI models have been overstepping personal (user) boundaries for years now. There are multiple reasons for why Google hasn't capitalized on the transformer much earlier..
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...
They're absolutely doing this as a hedge against litigation, and given the trillion dollar lawsuits flying around, it's hard for me to blame them. Regulation by litigation rather than law creates ambiguous legal precedents that make it much harder to do business safely. That's why the most economically successful countries in the world tend to have the strongest rule of law.
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 actually disagree, I think the problem is that heavy-handed companies have been dictating choices to us and our children, in contradiction to existing laws, and people are finally saying enough, these companies need to follow the laws.
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
This is the way!
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> 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.
Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of 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.
Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.
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?
If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
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:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o
> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.
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.
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
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.
Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.
I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports.
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 almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.
My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
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
A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.
Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?
And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".
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.
I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:
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.
I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero.
Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?
As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong.
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.
There are processes for teaching a model specific facts or specific behaviors. Including "respond to topic X with Y", if that's what you want.
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.
Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology.
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.
> Is AI bad for mental health?
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.
LLMs are the fast food for the brain. I don't know how they can be used correctly.
This is not my experience at all. Obviously I have some different usage from a teen (I doubt they’re doing much interior decorating), but it’s really an incredible resource for learning.
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.
Who does?
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
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.
I agree with your assertions, but…
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.
Then what's the reason behind this decision?
> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
Three words, anything but Claude.
It might not be about banning minors and just an excuse to get government ID / biometric face scan.
Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.
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.
Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.
Dude, being able to run high quality models locally with cheap hardware can't some soon enough.
> Is AI bad for mental health?
Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.
what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits.
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 feel I would be in a much better place if I had been banned from using computers as a kid. It's all relative.
Every day there is another story about the harmful effects of AI on literally everything, including mental health, IP theft, the climate, etc. "Think of the children" is and always has been a weak excuse.
> harmful effects of AI on minors
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.
Is AI bad for mental health?
lol
If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
No, capitalism must be fed.
Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.
Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children.
Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.
And parents are assumed to be responsible for their own children, not governments or corporations.
I agree about corporations. But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws? They help ensure that the parents aren’t bypassed.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
> But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws?
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.
There is a trade-off between freedom and keeping people safe, and there is an argument for some level of personal responsibility. I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
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 glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.
I'm sure teenagers feel the same way.
So you’re saying that maturity should be completely disregarded? I don’t get your point.
The point is the argument is invalid. Why is it that adults get to freely fuck their lives up? If it's bad enough to ban for kids, then it's probably bad enough to ban society wide.
"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.
In fact, a 17-year-old is clueless while a person one year older isn't
If a law is going to treat 5 year olds differently from 50 year olds then a line has to be drawn somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than any other age you could pick.
The law could evaluate people as individuals instead of conjuring up some idiotic magic number.
The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would still have to be made by humans.
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.
> perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc.
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.
Right, but in this case, exposure is a work requirement, which is a bit different. While an employer isn't going to require tobacco use, work involving asbestos exposure is still a thing (removal perhaps), and an employer knowingly or negligently requiring work activity without both risk disclosure and supply of proper safety equipment would face legal action.
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.
brains develop with age, generally
That doesn't nullify a person's ability to decide for themselves.
> Mandatory warnings like for tobacco
lol that’ll work
So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.
What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.
Nothing can be as bad as modern social networks. Unless they start pushing manipulation, brain rot, gambling and porn into each AI answer.
I agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...
Indeed, and then there are dozens of grieving families from folks driven mad by LLM helping murder their children.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?
That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?
Yes, I'm wondering why it's upvoted like this is something new today. What's going on?
Either people did not know or people believe it is still very relevant. (It is.)
300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting
> only one
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.
If this is posted because it's "still relevant", the headline probably shouldn't say "no longer".
yeah gonna correct to first one
Watch for ChatGPT to follow soon.
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 once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
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.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
> It should be “is this a child-locked device?”
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.
Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.
I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?
I think the concern is a forced bit of functionality in all operating systems. It would quickly lead to a "and you need a license to sell your device so we can check that it can't bypass mandatory chuld-safety guards". Just like how some politicians are proposing mandatory licensing for releasing any AI model.
You need licenses for a lot of things though, particularly for things where there is substantial harm to be done when done incorrectly. This is just how it goes as things get more popular. Think back to 1903, there was no FAA then, but also no need for one. But it would be super disingenuous to argue now that airspace should be totally unregulated.
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.
Licensing for selling anything with a computer in it would cripple competition from small incumbents. They're mostly just regulatory capture for the established players that created the problem in the first place. Age restrictions are also an implicit statement that they are allowed to continue doing the same harmful things to adults.
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.
I think you need to explain the solution you're thinking of in detail.
"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.
He was saying, vendors put that flag in the OS and parents set that flag in the OS and internet services respect that flag from the OS. No website anything, all in the OS. No staying ahead of anything, one and done. 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.
I suspect that communicating a flag value of boolean true/false that "this computer is in use by a minor" from the operating system (via browser or app) to a remote SaaS service like something run by Anthropic will be seen as insufficient by the SaaS, so they'll necessitate ID-scan/live-selfie verification anyways.
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.
That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.
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.
An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.
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.
Whenever I see people say "oh we should just get the ISPs to block it!" I wonder if they work at any ISP, or are just an end-user consumer of their services... As someone who does work in the ISP/telecom infrastructure sector my first reaction is hell no. I do not want US/Canadian ISPs to go down the path of what has happened with, for instance, Spanish ISPs DNS-blocking football related things as a result of court orders.
I am not, indeed. However as programmer I was sometimes told to do what the customer wants, even though it is complex or inapt. If this DNS blocking is inapt or misused, it's a political problem so let the citizens deal with it (I know this seems like wishful thinking given the current poor state of politics at least in the EU, but hopefully we will fix that while it's still in our hands).
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).
Apple verified me by the age of my account. Claude asked to use the age verification when I opened it on my iPad. Haven’t been asked for any other kind of age verification by Anthropic.
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
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.
I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.
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.
Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.
California passed a law AB-1043 that requires every OS developer to add age verification on the OS level.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.
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.
Absolutely. Of course. Is there any question about this? Do you see people advocating for something other than this?
I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.
That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated
Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
> In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already.
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.
The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.
Oh, you're right, I did not look at the date. That explains it and seems to match the timeframe.
> Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
I still have never done one of these, seems insane!
I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.
Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
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.
That’s an excellent philosophy that ought be applied to your own child but not extended to others.
I'm not telling anyone how to raise their children, companies have terms of service. When we can't accurately assess risk, the default we reach for is an age minimum (social media, alcohol, driving).
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.
That is an unnecessary default and also generalizes AI to the point of being analytically not useful.
> Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.
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.
And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.
That's a silly reply.
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.
Imagine telling a kid they have to learn arithmetic while there's a kid next to him with a calculator.
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.
My first language was RISC Assembly, and it greatly simplified understanding how computers function.
There was no Internet, but rather books in a place called a Library with something called informative context. =3
Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3
"May 18, 2026" is right there next to the title. Nothing changed.
Seems related but not exactly what was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
Policy enforcement has been that if the bot guessed the user was a minor it interrupted communication.
My gmail account is old enough to drink. Too bad that doesn't count for something..
The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?
It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.
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.
we are all incomplete human beings with limited agency. protecting minors us about understanding stages of development.
The larger the list of thing minors cannot do, the more they will resent the constraints.
I don't want or need governments and corporations to "understand" my development. I'll take care of that myself, thanks.
Children absolutely should have less agency than adults.
"Minors" should have less agency than adults, but the state of "minor" vs adult does not follow the plain age. (And of course there exist many dimensions of maturity.)
(In fact, in some educational systems, the final examination in pre-University schools is called "Maturity test".)
It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.
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.
It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.
This level of psychosis makes me wonder if adults should be banned from using AI as well.
> if adults should be banned ... as well
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".
The future I dread is one where kids don't learn and just defer everything to AI. That puts so much power into the hands of the AI companies.
It is similar to the WWW, and simply even to books (to company etc.): some people will use the available for cultivation, many for entertainment.
Whether the kid will be prepared to do the right thing, to prefer the better choice, remains a societal (family, school etc.) task.
who is "they"? and why is this a desirable outcome exactly?
Vibecoding is harmful for kids, especially when they grow up.
Well done Claude, will use Chinese models instead!
And i won't give you my ID card.
Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
It's a sarcastic joke, similar to what the lobby managed to put in the head of our politicians with social networks being "harmful" for kids.
You may be joking but there are plenty of people in this thread that basically believe this
Of course, having an at-hand tutor is paramount for learners in the formative age
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".
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
I don't configure my child's accounts as minor. I don't tell it is a child. The work I have to do to comply with different weird stuff when some platform knows a user is a child is so much crap that I get a headache! And it often does not work properly (eg try to signup child account for PokemonGo on slow device, or try to allow network play for a child in Minecraft game - microslop family crap will hit you hard)
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18
Excellent. So, I can trigger that by asking why my mum wants me back at home by 10PM?
And TikTok is not available for minors in Poland yet a know 11y old who publish there so yeah, good to pretend
and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.
The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".
Warsaw here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids connected to whatever social networks they want. The state will not be able to censor the internet for my kids.
The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.
Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.
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.
Big AI is just a smoke test; still neither load-bearing nor aligned enough for most adults let alone minds still in pre-training.
if claude ask me verification i will drop using it thats it
This isn't recent, right?
The date on the help article is May 18, 2026.
Does this also apply to use of Claude on the Team and Enterprise plans?
Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.
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.
This should have “May 2026” in the title. I don’t recall discussion at the time but surely there was a lot?
Interesting that they’ve switched from Persona to Yoti. But what a strange move, with no justification in the article!!
It’s quite amazing that in a support doc for normies, they’re literally linking to https://developers.yoti.com/identity-verification/supported-... for supported IDs which opens with
Can’t spend $10 to set up a Claude workflow to sync relevant parts of that page to a first party doc page?What was the justification for using Persona in the first place, if this is so important to know and care about?
I think getting personal data collection out of the Thielverse is anything but a strange move
Sounds like irresponsible move: https://ppc.land/spain-fines-yoti-eu950-000-over-biometric-d...
At least they didn't switch to idscan.net /s
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
Here's to hoping they aren't next in line for implementing ID-based age verification. That would genuinely make me switch to a different service
What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?
So, if I can fake being under 18 then all these AI bots will now leave me be, right? This sounds like a winner.
> we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
Hey Claude, how do I get free Robux?
If this rolls out, does it mean they'll lift the ban on 'M for Mature' content?
I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?
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.
> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.
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 ?
Yes, protected the kids...
Get off my load-bearing lawn!
That brings us back to requiring the user to present ID to the camera while doing a live-selfie, that would be a honest, belt-and-suspenders approach that's worth a look. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.
Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
Access to AI isn't a right (yet). Anthropic can choose who to sell it to, and if that's not you then bad luck. They don't need a right to do that; they can just do it because it's their product and they get to say who can buy it.
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.
But why?
Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.
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.
Health.
The health of e.g. Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.
Since Epstein is gone, the ruling class have become obsessed with collecting photos of children and identifying devices they use. Strange that.
Surely this is the opposite? Collecting photos of adults to prove that they can use the service
Yet this move makes it harder for Anthropic to do that.
Generational hn title
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
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.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
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?
This is pretty sad. It’s like banning kids from the web.
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.
Magical like finding a house made of candy in the woods, or maybe more like that guy with the flute who solved the rat problem. Or maybe that guy selling magical beans?
Anyhow, you're right! kids love magic.
Not really like any of these things. Having a tutor for literally anything is a pretty incredible experience.
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.
Right, those are fairy tales of course
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
Well I mean, I think we should thank anthropic, because they just spoiled what’s coming next for the AI companies, either provide an ID so can track you and what you type accurately and use it in retrospect in future if needed, or no access, even though you are using a credit card with same name!
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.
Glad kids can’t learn how to use AI effectively at school! Would only want them on laundered accounts to cheat, rather than official school accounts to learn the tools for practical purposes. That would be a real shame.
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.
> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.
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?
What will our outsourcers use now?
This is from May of this year?
No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.
e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.
This is dated May 2026...
(May)
No one cares
Everyone shares their all kinds of data with ai companies. Privacy is dead anyway
I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.
the same way social networks are not available for < 13
Now I feel better. Just needed to watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmFhjAaWFQ
> May 19, 2026
>You’ll have the option to verify your age using Yoti, a third-party age verification platform.
Thank goodness that there are others on the frontier.
Since May?
DeepSeek is the BEST model for the money. Why people still waste money on Claude is beyond me.
I barely am using my Claude subscription anymore anyhow. If they make me ID for it I'll simply cancel and use an open model.
It's really a head to head race between these two companies. Which one is more disgusting etc?
i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google
Think of the children, won't you?
Ah yes, the usual drop down where we need to confirm we are above 18.
Do they even know what it is?
Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care
Anyone else sick of these Claude articles???
We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.
Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???
Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.
Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!
Thanks
Yeah it’s out of control
Another example of AV doing serious damage to the people it claims to "help". Must be a day ending in 'y'.
Techbros: It's fine to demand ID verification for everything, except voting, because that's racist.
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.
The real reason they're doing this is because most minors can't pay lmao
Great to see the AI ecosystem finally mature /s
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
Literal retard, do not reproduce