Claude is only available to people over 18 years (support.claude.com)

588 pointsby Muhammad52316 hours ago609 comments

embedding-shape 16 hours ago

Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?

Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...

Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?

Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach

Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

wangxili1997 16 hours ago

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.

dkersten 15 hours ago

> 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.

lukan 15 hours ago

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.

dkersten 10 hours ago

Well, yes. Amusing might have been a better word than funny.

stingraycharles 15 hours ago

Yeah I don’t think Anthropic is particularly interested in tracking individuals in the same way that companies like Facebook and Google are.

embedding-shape 15 hours ago

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.

chrisjj 10 hours ago

Because Anthropic would never sell ad space. Promise. /s

cyanydeez 16 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape 16 hours ago

> 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.

azan_ 16 hours ago

You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.

duskdozer 15 hours ago

Why would they need to do ID checks then?

azan_ 15 hours ago

Liability

embedding-shape 15 hours ago

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.

password54321 15 hours ago

Haven't they reported "anonymous" users before to the police?

fn-mote 15 hours ago

Can you source this? Seems believable but I haven’t heard it before.

embedding-shape 15 hours ago

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?

cobolcomesback 14 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape 12 hours ago

Yeah, surely assuming how some random HN user browses the internet never been wrong.

cyanydeez 14 hours ago

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.

cobolcomesback 14 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape 12 hours ago

> 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.

asadotzler 11 hours ago

It's been a slow decline for about 15 years. It's as if the median age went from about 23 to about 15.

cobolcomesback 11 hours ago

Considering you began this thread of discussion by cherry picking a single phrase from the GP and then contributing nothing to the discussion other than “you’re hopelessly naive”, perhaps you are the one who needs to read the HN posting guidelines.

If you post slop, you should expect slop replies.

password54321 16 hours ago

>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.

abirch 15 hours ago

I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.

fn-mote 15 hours ago

Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.

Cthulhu_ 15 hours ago

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.

newswasboring 14 hours ago

> In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.

LLMs can barely identify gaps in their own software designs, and they are provably good at making software.

duskwuff 9 hours ago

LLMs are also incredibly poor at recognizing that they're "out of their depth", especially when their context is already full of their attempts to do something.

officeplant 14 hours ago

>In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.

Given there have been multiple suicides driven by LLMs. I really doubt that.

tt24 11 hours ago

Fascinating perspective - any technology that has caused >0 deaths is a dead end and has no chance of improvement.

officeplant 10 hours ago

I'm sure the Torment Nexus can be improved.

micromacrofoot 14 hours ago

In practice we know that LLMs have aided in suicide, so what they should do in theory doesn't matter.

voakbasda 12 hours ago

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.

nekusar 15 hours ago

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.

cheesecakegood 2 hours ago

I’ve seen about 8 therapists and 3 coaches at various times in the last 15 years. 5-6/8 and 2/3 respectively were, I eventually realized, mostly in it for the money and didn’t actually care too much (if at all) about me making any positive changes permanent. It wasn’t all bad; having someone confidential to talk to is in itself valuable, but the cost/benefit ratio is not at all consistent.

With that kind of benchmark comparison, it’s not all that hard for AI to present some kind of favorable value proposition, even if also inconsistent but with a harder ceiling on the upside.

miki123211 14 hours ago

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.

newswasboring 14 hours ago

The need is not in question, the solution is. This annoying glaze machine is not it for mental health tasks.

nish__ 14 hours ago

Most people have friends and family to "glaze" them anyway. I don't see it as a major danger. Also, it's gotten better with the glazing lately anyway.

hatsix 13 hours ago

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.

p-e-w 12 hours ago

Tens of millions of people disagree with you. What makes you think you know better than them what is right for them?

z0r 12 hours ago

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It's OK for someone to believe that using an AI as an approximate therapist might be a bad idea, especially in light of the many publicly documented cases of AI feeding delusional thoughts and encouraging suicide.

p-e-w 9 hours ago

> This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in.

It absolutely does, you just believe you can decide for others what’s harmful for them.

newswasboring 8 hours ago

Who's deciding for anybody?

newswasboring 8 hours ago

The plethora of AI psychosis reports. The existence of my boyfriend is AI subreddit and almost all the content on it.

rottenface583 14 hours ago

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.

officeplant 14 hours ago

Honestly I could go for a mental health cougar right about now.

selimthegrim 12 hours ago

I don’t think they’re free either

ipaddr 10 hours ago

They buy you drinks you promise to leave before her teenaged sons wakeup

lmc 14 hours ago

Decent therapists advocate for cultivating resilience for such situations.

p-e-w 12 hours ago

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.

thunderfork 12 hours ago

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.

lmc 11 hours ago

The point is to try and limit what becomes an emergency in the first place. Having an argument with a spouse shouldn't necessitate an immediate call to a therapist.

wat10000 8 hours ago

And adjusting a curtain rod shouldn't necessitate a call to 911 and an ambulance ride to the hospital, but sometimes shit happens.

kbelder 11 hours ago

So do decent parents and friends.

threetonesun 14 hours ago

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.

burningChrome 12 hours ago

>> Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional

I'm not sure where you live. I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling, along with free telesupport. My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time. There are free mental health clinics all over my city. There's mental health professionals who did daily outreach with the homeless and addicts in our city.

This doesn't even start to list all of the available apps you can download from your health care provider for free resources that are available to you.

This might have been true 30-40 years ago, but even over the last decade during and after covid, healthcare providers have put a huge emphasis on mental health and counseling to give people an abundance of resources to help them - when they need help, not in four days when someone is available.

ipaddr 10 hours ago

"My company has onsite mental health professionals who you can talk to or call at any time."

Can't see that coming to bite you.

gs17 6 hours ago

> I know almost all colleges in the US have walk in free mental health counseling

I've been to two universities and this was not the case from the university itself, especially outside of normal business hours. If you didn't have an emergency, you had to wait months, if you had an emergency (I was explicitly told the only way to see someone anytime soon was if I said I'd kill myself if I didn't get an appointment and then they'd see if there was someone available) you might be able to talk to someone sooner. After hours emergencies maybe the psych ward at the hospital would see you? There's free resources, but universities aren't really providing much.

iamgopal 16 hours ago

You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.

Cthulhu_ 15 hours ago

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.

chrisjj 15 hours ago

> 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.

paintbox 15 hours ago

I can't figure out if you're joking or not.

chrisjj 8 hours ago

Yoti Remember Me ID.

https://yoti.my.site.com/yotisupport/s/article/What-is-a-Rem...

Dylan16807 7 hours ago

That specific link is basically just "having an account" if anonymity is turned off.

If you include the anonymous version are you calling a basic cookie an "advertiser's dream"? Then that's not something new they would get if the cookie tracked age verification. And you can reset cookies every visit (or more often). The "that person" of a site-specific session cookie is not a big deal for privacy.

chrisjj 5 hours ago

"user identifiers".

Dylan16807 2 hours ago

I'll say it again but simpler:

The "user identifiers" are just having an account. That's when it's not set to be anonymous in the first place.

When it is set to be anonymous, it doesn't do this.

tsukikage 15 hours ago

It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.

petcat 15 hours ago

Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.

The whole thing is pointless.

nonethewiser 13 hours ago

Pointless?

If you dont microregulate technology how can you regulate the consequences of regulating technology?

The regulators need this.

adamsb6 10 hours ago

EU parliament gets bonuses?

phyzix5761 15 hours ago

Bank? So now you know what bank they use?

miki123211 15 hours ago

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.

deaton 13 hours ago

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.

AnthonyMouse 11 hours ago

> 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.

bitmasher9 15 hours ago

I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”.

Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”

brainwad 13 hours ago

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.

micromacrofoot 14 hours ago

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.

egorfine 14 hours ago

> or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"

It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID.

estearum 13 hours ago

QAnon for nerds

itintheory 12 hours ago

Whose cause? I think the government already has our IDs, given that they issued them.

sicktriple 12 hours ago

The government isn't typically facilitating the check. In order to verify your age, you will be required to hand over your ID to a third party, who's privacy and security practices are likely: "Trust me bro."

Seeing as how these companies get hacked all the time, (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...) , I don't think it's unreasonable to resist this.

Furthermore, I think many folks have reservations about requiring an ID checkpoint to utilize a computer. Obviously it's not that bad yet, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that the landscape is certainly trending in that direction, and it's absolutely not unreasonable to point out that governments and institutions to have a material interest in setting up access controls on who can and can't use the internet (read: participate in society).

itintheory 12 hours ago

Right, I'm not a fan of the ID check or identity/age verification. I'm just trying to understand the conspiracy theory kind of idea that "they're trying to get all our IDs!!!1!!" sentiment.

AnthonyMouse 11 hours ago

"The government already has our IDs" is missing the correlation between the ID and the service. They know your face and your name but not what you do on the internet. The website knows what you do on the internet but it isn't tied to your name. It's the tying them together which is the problem.

Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.

It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.

LoganDark 11 hours ago

It's not possible to prove the user is anything ever. It probably never will be. Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID. Which is even more reason to reject ID verification.

AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago

> Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID.

Exactly. Which in turn requires you to have some way of tying those accounts to that ID, which was supposed to be the thing to be prevented.

jonathanstrange 10 hours ago

Governments don't necessarily have the connection between your ID and what you do online, though, and some governments are known to massively buy publicly available data from data brokers to circumvent existing laws. By "some governments" I mean the US government, by the way. That's not a conspiracy either, it's well-documented.

londons_explore 11 hours ago

Whilst this is OP's point, the reality is the majority of big tech companies have been treating user data like radioactive waste for 10+ years.

Most user data is of minimal economic value, until you leak it, and then suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way.

Better to not hold the data in the first place.

shevy-java 10 hours ago

But then why do they want to sniff after everyone?

Storing all that information is cheap nowadays. Any state agency may be happy to get more information about The People.

rpdillon 8 hours ago

> majority of big tech companies have been treating user data like radioactive waste for 10+ years.

They're collecting more than ever.

numpad0 4 hours ago

PIIs and payment details are radioactive if explicitly collected as such, or just "anonymized" query parameters if not.

egorfine 8 hours ago

> suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way

I'm not sure about that. As I see it, there is no business case for treating PII carefully: security costs money while leaking PII costs nothing and has no repercussions.

ceehex 7 hours ago

you must be living under a rock, mutable user data like usage habits is being collected at increasing levels

zahlman 4 hours ago

I think GP is about PII rather than "mutable user data".

dgabriel 10 hours ago

We don't want your static ID, we want where and what you are at this moment in order to better tune the algorithm. Your ID is frozen in time, so at any given moment, big tech knows more about you than the government does. IDs are only good for minimal verification purposes.

downrightmike 10 hours ago

Its actually to leak your gov't ID so data brokers can soak it up

win311fwg 14 hours ago

> from a trusted party like a bank.

For what reason should I trust a bank?

kees99 13 hours ago

Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money.

GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly.

[1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a "full-mesh" of partnering of every SP with every bank directly would not scale.

win311fwg 13 hours ago

> You (somewhat) trust your bank

For what reason?

> Since you know, they have your money.

You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with anything else. Principle of least privilege, if you will. Anthropic has your chat data, which in many ways is more valuable than money, so if the only bar for free lying giving out your personal details is trusting a business with something of yours then why bother with this complex scheme and give Anthropic all of your personal information directly?

petcat 13 hours ago

> You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other PII.

This doesn't really make any sense and it feels like it's just an attempt to be contrarian.

Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.

AnthonyMouse 11 hours ago

> Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.

And those laws are extremely invasive and should be repealed. It's offensive to have a law that de facto requires you to identify yourself in order to pay for a newspaper subscription or buy contraceptives over the internet.

But that's not the issue in this case. It's that the bank knows your name and what you buy -- already very bad -- but now you want to create a path to tying that information to everything you do on the internet.

tayo42 6 hours ago

Can't you pay cash for things like Visa gift cards and use them online?

AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago

Gift cards don't allow reloading which consequently makes them a significant inconvenience to use for subscriptions. It's sort of like saying you can pay for something by going to their offices and paying in cash. Okay, but then why does the way that 99.9% of people are actually going to do it have to be the one that invades their privacy and puts everything they do in a database?

numpad0 4 hours ago

depends on local laws?

riknos314 13 minutes ago

At least in the US most places that sell gift cards require ID when purchased in cash

win311fwg 11 hours ago

> Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.

That is technically true, but keep in mind that in the early days of banking banks expected you to provide that information without the hand of the law requiring it. The laws you speak of came into effect after the fact to normalize across the industry what the banks were already doing. History is repeating itself in tech, and we already know lawmakers are waiting with bated breath to do their thing all over again just as they did in banking once critical adoption is there.

I expect what you are trying to get at is that you are willing to trust a bank because giving them your life story was already normalized before you were born, so you have never thought to question it. Whereas tech doing the same now feels new and scary. However, that's a funny way to look at it as the kids born in the future, who never knew the world where you could use the internet anonymously, will see giving tech their ID as being no different than how you see giving your bank your ID.

Although I can understand why you would now question why any business that does little more than store numbers on a computer needs a comprehensive profile on you by law or otherwise. Normalized does not equal sensible. That is a fair point.

pessimizer 2 hours ago

> it feels like it's just an attempt to be contrarian.

You feel like it's an attempt to be contrarian not to inform your bank about everything that you do?

Society has reached a dangerous point.

dpkirchner 13 hours ago

> You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with any other personal information.

How do you expect that they will give you your money when you walk in to a branch and ask for a withdrawal? Or that they'll replace a lost card? Surely you'd expect them to verify your identity.

AnthonyMouse 11 hours ago

They could verify your identity if you've given it to them.

But it would also be completely reasonable to authenticate the customer exclusively using mechanisms other than government ID. You can already make a withdrawal using your bank card and PIN. If you lose your card you could sign into their website using your password and request a new one etc.

Consider what happens if you lose your government ID. Your bank has much better ways to authenticate you at that point than the government does. Government ID has a major bootstrap problem, whereas patronizing a service doesn't because a new account with no money in it belongs to whoever is signing up for it regardless of who they are, and you can at that point give them a bank card and have them provide a password and email address etc. that allows you to identify them in subsequent transactions without ever needing their name.

win311fwg 11 hours ago

Well, how do you expect a website to know that you are 18+?

The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you.

Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company, so why not just give the tech company your ID and skip all that technical complexity? Understandably the broader idea presented earlier was that you cannot trust businesses operated by people, but then that includes banks, so...

For the sake of discussion, if we accept that technical solution and the need for a trusted third-party that is a business run by people, surely it should at least be a business that does nothing but offer profile trust to minimize the blast radius? For what reason would we want that business to have their hand in other activities like chat or banking?

dpkirchner 8 hours ago

> Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company

Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is or ever will be (IMO, I could end up surprised).

I trust my bank to know who I am and keep track of my money. I trust big tech to lose or misinterpret my data, to close my account for no reason, etc, and to face zero consequences for those failures -- not even fines.

win311fwg 6 hours ago

> Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is

That's true, but remember what we're talking about: Using banks (or another trusted third-party) to assert your age instead of having big tech collecting your personal information themselves. There is context here. Writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense.

In that context it is understood that only incentive for big tech to follow the proposed is regulation, but if you are going to push regulation on them then you can regulate them just as much as banks.

Your broader point that, in the real world, there isn't much political will to push any of that regulation is also no doubt true, but, again, writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense. The hypothetical of big tech adopting a third-party attestation system was already understood to be just that: hypothetical.

deaton 13 hours ago

I trust my bank a whole lot more than I trust Anthropic

win311fwg 9 hours ago

If I had a bank, I'd trust it too, it being mine. Most people don't have the luxury, though. In practice, they have to outsource banking to other people. And those other people are already quite likely to move around between both Anthropic and various banks in search of whomever will offer them the most economic benefits. It is not like a particular logo on their current business card is going to change their character. You do you, of course, you are already unique in having a bank you can call your own. But the fact remains that most people strongly believe that a person's trustworthiness is of the person, not the activity they happen to be doing at the time.

rivetfasten 12 hours ago

Colorado and a few other states have zero knowledge proof apps capable of this.

This is fantastic, except that the idea of mandatory government software only available on chosen proprietary platforms feels way worse.

If there were a way to crypto-notarize a third-party wallet token etc blah blah, then it would be interesting.

At the end of the day though, this is about protecting the powerful, not the kids.

shevy-java 10 hours ago

I do not want my computer to yield information to evil outside actors in general. This is why systemd going that way is so outrageous:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

trashface 10 hours ago

I think many linux users will apparently have been born on Jan 1 1970

SoftTalker 8 hours ago

Strange, when I buy beer at Kroger and the "ID verification" guy has to come over, he looks at me and just keys in 01/01/1970 as my birth date most of the time. Or just asks me what my birthday is and I give him a random date in the late 1960s.

dlopes7 7 hours ago

Isn’t the very first option on the article a service that estimates your age without ID? Are they lying?

odo1242 7 hours ago

Well, that’s basically just the California law everyone hated

TZubiri 15 hours ago

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.

jscott0918 15 hours ago

*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

choo-t 15 hours ago

> 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.

anon1097 15 hours ago

Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p

choo-t 13 hours ago

Of course, but it's also, with teenage years, the best years to learn tools.

breezey3po 14 hours ago

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.

choo-t 13 hours ago

> 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.

oceanplexian 7 hours ago

Ultimately it will be ID verification. How else are you going to check age?

Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.

simoncion 14 hours ago

> 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.

TZubiri 10 hours ago

Counterargument, everyone lived a childhood, but not everyone lives adulthood, so childhood affects more people. Also related, childhood is foundational, what happens in childhood forms who you are as an adult, so issues in childhood affect you as an adult too.

cmiles74 15 hours ago

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.

cowboylowrez 14 hours ago

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.

kps 14 hours ago

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.

29348915 13 hours ago

Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.

Hizonner 12 hours ago

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.

subscribed 5 hours ago

I am a parent and I'm grossly offended by the thin veil of fake excuses in the effort to normalise staggering invasion of privacy.

For my kids.

This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.

If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.

vova_hn2 15 hours ago

> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

I doubt that this statement is true.

embedding-shape 14 hours ago

If it wasn't true before, it'll certainly appear to be true to Anthropic after this change, regardless if it's actually true or not in practice.

groundzeros2015 14 hours ago

Paying customers?

icedchai 13 hours ago

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.

hobofan 15 hours ago

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.

miki123211 15 hours ago

If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.

Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."

tt24 10 hours ago

So in your example a microwave company should be held liable if someone puts a child in a microwave?

nprateem 15 hours ago

> 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

Anon1096 15 hours ago

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.

FpUser 15 hours ago

there is no smoke without fire

brookst 14 hours ago

“Suspicion is the same as fact”

afpx 15 hours ago

Some people are just better pattern matchers

brookst 14 hours ago

That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

dns_snek 13 hours ago

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.

brookst an hour ago

> more often than not

Any data on that? Because to me it sounds like “because they are sometimes true, we should assume they are always true”

But I’m open to data.

ithkuil 10 hours ago

Being good at matching patterns doesn't mean the patterns you found have the causal relationships you think they have

Superstition in pigeons: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001

afpx 8 hours ago

but the pigeon doesn't have the benefit of using bayesian priors nor collaboration

anon1097 15 hours ago

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'

imjonse 14 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape 14 hours ago

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?

Anon1096 13 hours ago

Yes multiple companies in people's favorite acronyms.

ImPostingOnHN 14 hours ago

I guess you could call capitalism a conspiracy theory if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that, yes, it exists.

mdp2021 14 hours ago

> for good or neutral reasons

Are you capable of identifying dystopian movements the single moves of which get justified as "for people's good"?

rixrax 15 hours ago

And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.

mikeocool 15 hours ago

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.

brookst 15 hours ago

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.

torginus 15 hours ago

I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)

sam-cop-vimes 14 hours ago

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.

skrebbel 14 hours ago

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.

shrubby 13 hours ago

I 105 percent trust anything and everything a zillion dollar company promises!

roboror 12 hours ago

Right, Sending off my data to some random 3rd party company with far lower stakes does not make me feel better.

skinfaxi 14 hours ago

Wasn't there a purported breach of a huge KYC service, idscan recently? https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/fbi-investigates-massiv...

iAMkenough 13 hours ago

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...

throw310822 11 hours ago

80% of comments on AI-related stuff are lazy snipes now. Feels more and more like a forum of know-it-all teenagers.

bdangubic 14 hours ago

> 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... :)

gsquaredxc 14 hours ago

Even better: All of the under 18 users are probably on the free plan. It’s fairly likely that this demographic is disproportionately expensive.

groundzeros2015 14 hours ago

This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem).

alansaber 14 hours ago

Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick!

nonethewiser 14 hours ago

It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data.

Dlemlo 13 hours ago

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.

ozgung 13 hours ago

More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.

Waterluvian 13 hours ago

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."

brycewray 13 hours ago

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/

jerf 12 hours ago

Took a bit of poking, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDQ5z7bNPs

eterm 8 hours ago

That sound quality did something weird to my brain, I was convinced sound was accidentally coming out my laptop speakers not my headphones. I'm not even on my laptop, and I still took my headphones off to check.

DANmode 17 minutes ago

Almost assuredly a video capture of a screen.

HaZeust 5 hours ago

This one is a ripped recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzHKwhrN1Lg

bena 11 hours ago

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

ratelimitsteve 8 hours ago

Joke's on you, as standards loosen now PG-13 movies get up to eleven "fuck"s to distribute throughout the film (nineteen for documentaries)

SoftTalker 8 hours ago

Today's 13 year olds say that word more times than that before breakfast.

lo_zamoyski 8 hours ago

Which is, of course, a bad thing that ought not to be encouraged and that ubiquity does, in fact, encourage and normalize.

ratelimitsteve 7 hours ago

>Which is, of course, a bad thing that ought not to be encouraged

I'm not actually willing to take that as read. It's just the word "fuck". You may personally find it distasteful and you're welcome to discourage your children from using it but it seems like you're committing Pargin's Blunder here (mistaking norms specific to your social group for universal truths).

rnd0 6 hours ago

So fucking what? Nothing wrong with that. Lighten up, francis.

pessimizer 2 hours ago

If the word fuck isn't offensive, there's absolutely no reason to use it.

defrost 2 hours ago

Yet every culture across the globe has and has always had swearing, profanity, taboo words, fart jokes, and gate keepers decrying such things.

While the reasons may elude, the ubiquity speaks to something foundational.

lazyasciiart 2 hours ago

Yea. Nobody needs to be talking that much before breakfast.

HWR_14 7 hours ago

PG-13 didn't exist in 1981. It went straight from PG to R. So less loosening of restrictions, and more adding gradation.

brudgers 4 hours ago

And in 1981 PG movies had tits.

Jimmc414 an hour ago

Airplane (1980) was PG.

classichasclass 7 hours ago

And one of the rare incidences of the MPAA ratings banner appearing in the middle of a film.

forshaper 13 hours ago

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.

superxpro12 12 hours ago

and its 1 pixel wide. I propose the term pixtit

Waterluvian 12 hours ago

Also the Dixel for the male option.

freedomben 10 hours ago

> Those are just compliance tits.

Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D

abustamam 3 hours ago

Great story! I remember sharing my screen at work recently and the URL bar suggested https://thisisnotporn.com/ because I had been playing it a bit on my phone and my browser history synced to my work. I dont know if anyone caught it but I started using a different browser after that. Because it indeed is not porn but hard to explain that!

mrandish 10 hours ago

Why not? We already need to include typos and misspellings to signal we're not an LLM.

pigpop 7 hours ago

What use is this when you can just prompt the LLM to insert those or use any other style of writing that looks human?

erg0s4m 10 hours ago

Right this is exactly what happened with the new sesame laws. The government declared sesame as an allergen and enacted heavy fines if it was undisclosed. This lead to manufacturers adding sesame because they couldn't guarantee they were sesame free.

Zak 8 hours ago

"May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product.

GloriousKoji 8 hours ago

That's part of the problem. "May contain" doesn't provide legal protection and then if you make it a standard there needs to be testing for compliance which ends up as the same original problem and you just add compliance tits to your food product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116211

Zak 8 hours ago

"May contain" should provide legal protection. It may be compliance tits in some cases, but that's better than forcing the addition of a compliance ingredient.

Dylan16807 7 hours ago

> "May contain" doesn't provide legal protection

Yes, this causes problems.

> and then if you make it a standard there needs to be testing for compliance

Why would there need to be any additional testing? If anything I'd expect "may" foods to need less testing than an accident-prone "no" food.

HWR_14 7 hours ago

Then there would never be a reason not to list "may contain sesame". Just like every product causes cancer in california.

ratelimitsteve 8 hours ago

do you have an example of this? it feels like a suboptimal response even given the stupid, heavy-handed legislation you cite.

thewakalix 8 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116211

https://www.fox9.com/news/new-us-food-label-law-unintended-e...

> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.

> Instead, some companies have taken a different approach. Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding "a minimal amount of sesame flour" to the company’s famous breadsticks "due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery."

pelican0 6 hours ago

related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65...

> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.

ruined 7 hours ago

©©

abustamam 5 hours ago

Kinda orthogonal to this, but the other day I was looking for a friend's cheer routine on Instagram so I put her school name and cheerleader routine and I got a lot of images and videos of very young girls (like aged 6-16) in very revealing cheer outfits doing provocative dances which made me very uncomfortable for many reasons. Like first, why are you making your 6 year old do this, and second, why is Instagram floating these to the top instead of adults? I dont think I want to know the answers to either of those questions.

pstuart 21 minutes ago

Add beauty pageants to that list. It's gross, and a lot of people are ok with it.

donatj 4 hours ago

I mean, isn't this basically what's already happening after COPPA with YouTubers having to swear or make adult jokes to prove to the bots they're not targeting children with their videos?

square_usual 13 hours ago

It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.

hirvi74 12 hours ago

Sometimes I have to double-check the URL to make sure I am not on Reddit.

Dylan16807 7 hours ago

Trying to collect personal info might not be the motivation but it's not at all a crackpot theory. And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?

Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.

Barrin92 3 hours ago

>And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?

the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane

Dylan16807 2 hours ago

> the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence

Nobody alleged a conspiracy.

> Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane

That's not why they said that. This is a ridiculous criticism of OP.

00deadbeef 12 hours ago

Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID?

kmoser 12 hours ago

Do you mean the part where it says they use signals to determine your age?

againstapples 12 hours ago

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?

ajkjk 12 hours ago

Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin.

trunnell 11 hours ago

I can tell you don't know anyone at Anthropic.

putlake 11 hours ago

From TFA: Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance. Your selfie, document images, and any personal data are deleted by Yoti as soon as your age is checked. Anthropic never sees your ID or image; we receive only a pass/fail result and do not process or store any personal data from the verification.

badgersnake 6 hours ago

If you believe that you’ll buy my NFT.

dawnerd 4 hours ago

Didn’t that id verification service that just had the massive breach also say similar about data retention? Doesn’t matter if they delete if the data is being intercepted somewhere along the line.

chrisjj 11 hours ago

Claude Executive: Damn, schools are moving to teach the ill effects of our fake AI. How can we stop that?

Claude Product Manager: Give me 2sec...

jonas21 10 hours ago

More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

[2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-...

tangotaylor 8 hours ago

Thank you, I'm glad someone brought up SB 1119. I hate it.

California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.

This law seems a blatant regulatory capture grift by OpenAI to calcify their teen mode into law and hurt competitors. https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-...

drngdds 10 hours ago

I don't think "we hardly know who our users are" is a problem any AI company is having lol

notesinthefield 7 hours ago

You always take the written policy win over thoughtful technical controls. Way easier for the whole org.

mayhemducks 14 hours ago

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.

fluidcruft 14 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 14 hours ago

> 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!

Valodim 14 hours ago

> 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.

throwaway323929 13 hours ago

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?

jachee 13 hours ago

> we're not talking about a product that kills its users

Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.

throwaway323929 13 hours ago

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.

musha68k 12 hours ago

"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...

throwaway323929 12 hours ago

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.

eigencoder 12 hours ago

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.

maipen 13 hours ago

> 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.

throwaway323929 12 hours ago

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?

phoghed 12 hours ago

Seeing what it’s done to my VP’s and execs I can’t imagine the damage it’s going to children smh

x187463 9 hours ago

This has 'social media will bring us all together' vibes.

phoghed 12 hours ago

> 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

pixl97 9 hours ago

The libertarian types can be just as highly resistant to facts as any other political lean.

webdood90 11 hours ago

> 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.

AlienRobot 11 hours ago

People have a right to privacy. People should value that more, before it's all gone.

pixl97 9 hours ago

They have a right to privacy, but they don't have the right to your product.

alt227 8 hours ago

If people have a right to privacy, why is it disappearing?

Retr0id 11 hours ago

The tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries want a lot of things, but it doesn't make those things bad by default.

Cider9986 11 hours ago

I don't have a problem showing an ID, I have a problem with an ID being recorded so it can be leaked.

lkramer 10 hours ago

Unless you think they are outright lying, the press release does say it will be immediately deleted.

pixl97 9 hours ago

Well in the ID scan leak wasn't there just a stream of data that was stolen? Deletion doesn't matter in that case.

iAMkenough 9 hours ago

I don’t think they are outright lying, but a similar third-party identity verification service was compromised recently. every ID scanned at a Hertz rental car counter was siphoned to the attacker’s system.

The company might not be storing your scans, but there’s always the chance someone else might be. I’d prefer to not risk it.

pishpash 6 hours ago

Identify a harm first and then go through the deliberative process. The company deciding it wants this usually means you run the other way, not towards it. Did Big Tobacco volunteer to think of the children?

alansaber 14 hours ago

Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either

Hizonner 12 hours ago

> 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.

none2585 6 hours ago

I think they meant it more as

"Let parents decide if their kids can use this tool and have them prevent access to it if not."

rirze 11 hours ago

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.

munificent 10 hours ago

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.

I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.

This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:

* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.

* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.

(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)

alt227 9 hours ago

> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.

I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.

pixl97 9 hours ago

Define bad parenting?

Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?

Should they go hungry when not fed?

Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?

The libertarian "eh whatever" means of government has a lot of negative side effects too.

siddthesquid 9 hours ago

Also these kids will grow up to do harm to the communities in that state, which will spend more money at the end cleaning up those mistakes.

alt227 8 hours ago

Right now governments in western societies are pouring more money and resources than ever into support programs, and yet we still have record high levels of mental health, unemployment, poverty, waiting times for doctors and support staff etc etc.

Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.

See here for much information about how spending has increased in these sectors in the UK, yet simultaneously seeing increasingly higher percentage levels of people requiring support in our societies.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...

Where do you think this trend will end? Do you think governments spending more tax money on these services will solve the problem?

notrealyme123 8 hours ago

This data does not support the argument made here.

wakamoleguy 8 hours ago

These statistics don't necessarily imply that the programs don't improve the situation, only that mental health outcomes are worsening faster than programs are improving them. The existence of support programs could also encourage more measurement of mental health issues, which says nothing about the ground truth.

crtified 8 hours ago

It's a complex fantasy humanity has made up, where our current generational burnout is instead given names like autism and ADHD - so that we can pretend that we have something to "fix".

The irony is that the goal of the fix is to "get these outliers back into society, (so that humanity can be as collectively productive as we should be)".

Even more ironic are the next cries : "They're not getting fixed. Take away their money."

siddthesquid 8 hours ago

So I'll tell you right now that I don't have proof or evidence for my claims, but my impression is that:

- Agreed that the solution will not be just blindly pouring more money into community resources. But I am not convinced that these organizations getting money really understand how to help people. It's sort of like the D.A.R.E. program in college. These people are so out of touch with what college students will listen to. But I'm sure donors of these programs will pat themselves on their back when they reiterate their mission statements.

- There is probably some correlation between bad parenting and income. If you need to work more to pay the bills, its difficult to spend your time and attention toward your kids. Obviously, "economy" is not an easy problem to solve haha.

- Information asymmetry/overload I feel is a big issue. Look at how any mainstream news media on the left or right will trivialize any issue, or distract you from more important things. Or look at websites relying on dark patterns to lure users.

- So many solutions require longer time periods to fully realize. If we say "improving education will help solve our problems", then we will probably need to wait longer than a US president's two terms to see if those solutions works.

Ultimately, we don't need "more" solutions, we need "better" solutions. We need things like leaders who understand system dynamics, education systems that teach emotional intelligence, and a culture around science that isn't driven by monetary incentives.

I am personally very inspired by Sanya Nishtar's efforts in Pakistan to spend her time and money investigating how focusing on solutions at the scale of individual communities and utilizing modern technological solutions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBkavI3jxY

feoren 6 hours ago

Really trying to assume good faith here, but it's hard ...

We have record high levels of people needing support at the same time we have record high levels of spending on that support? What an outrage! Obviously nothing is working and government bad!

Of course the spending on support services goes up as more people need that support. We're supposed to assume that's some sort of failure?

> Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.

If by "proven" you mean "kinda maybe arguable if you intentionally misrepresent correlational studies", sure.

Exoristos 7 hours ago

Given an effective sample size, parents have a much higher success rate ensuring children do not grow up as hazards to the society than publicly-funded programs do.

pixl97 5 hours ago

You seem to be missing the catch-22 situation here.

alt227 8 hours ago

> Define bad parenting?

Parents that do things that are bad for their kids wellbeing.

> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?

Yes it should do nothing

> Should they go hungry when not fed?

Yes they should

> Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?

These days modern jails are rehabilitation centres so its a moot point, but yes we should.

I know this is not popular, you can choose to downvote me if you like. But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it. IMO perfect is the enemy of good here.

Goronmon 8 hours ago

I'm not sure "make sure kids have food" rises to the level of "perfection" when it comes to measuring society.

But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it.

I think many would argue that a society unwilling to feed or educate children is pretty "broken".

Is willing to make sure kids are fed bad, but making sure that kids aren't physically or sexually abused fine? Or is that also off the table because we don't want to make life too easy for everyone?

isolatedsystem 4 hours ago

Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?

Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?

pesus 4 hours ago

This is a ridiculous and incoherent belief. Ensuring children have enough food to survive isn't making life "too comfortable". Letting millions of children starve and/or never get an education because you don't like the vibes of it is sociopathic and is what will actually break society. We should not tolerate child abuse just because you think intervening makes society too soft.

I'm sure you wouldn't feel the same way if you were that starving child or grew up with imperfect parents or in an environment that had actual hardships. This lack of basic empathy and introspection can only occur from someone who has been completely isolated from much of the real world their entire life. You are not arguing against perfect being the enemy of good, you are arguing against having any sort of good in the world at all, and it's obviously coming from a place of extreme comfort and luxury.

There's no chance you'd be saying anything like this if you had ever experienced anything close to poverty and starvation. Ironically, it appears having an upbringing that is too comfortable is what causes these beliefs in the first place.

csomar 8 hours ago

What do any of these have to do with you handing over you ID to some random web service?

wavemode 7 hours ago

> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?

> Should they go hungry when not fed?

> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?

Of course the government should do something. They should punish the neglectful parent, and take away the child if needed.

What I'm missing is the logical leap to "everyone must give their sensitive personal information to an overseas corporation".

orangebread 6 hours ago

I don't think it's an either or situation. We are on the precipice of a paradigm that's barely comprehensible to the average populace. There needs to be a conversation first before anything is decided. Everyone is too quick on the trigger.

pishpash 6 hours ago

Who decides what is bad parenting? You tread on dangerous grounds.

therealdrag0 2 hours ago

Whatever it is it should at least try to be data driven. And have a strong connection with harms and dysfunction. None of this 2% non-reproducible study BS.

More than 50% of boys admit to intentionally viewing poor, and most of them weekly.

Many think this is a slam dunk for a nanny state to step in. But surely we would have hard causal data on the need for it if that was the case? And I’m pretty sure we don’t.

Now let’s apply this simple bar to Claude, etc.

munificent an hour ago

To be clear, I made no mention of the state or responsibility.

All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.

There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.

tangotaylor 8 hours ago

> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.

I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.

The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.

Dylan16807 6 hours ago

There's different kinds of shitty and they didn't mean that kind.

pishpash 6 hours ago

Then don't use the shitty to justify what to do with the not really shitty. It's a logical fallacy.

Dylan16807 5 hours ago

Nobody did that. When they said "shitty" they meant the specific kind relevant to the rules they were discussing.

eikenberry 7 hours ago

> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.

The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.

Exoristos 7 hours ago

This is a very cogent observation that I'm afraid is going to go over many heads. Children and parents are intrinsically suited to each other by genetics, shared environment, and other empirical factors. Societal and legal reasoning that asserts a child as a Platonic form cannot in fact benefit the singular development of that child.

zanellato19 7 hours ago

i.e., luck

eikenberry 6 hours ago

And 2 is lucky it is the sum of 1+1.

cheesecakegood 2 hours ago

If luck = something you didn’t choose or had no control over, sure.

If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.

If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.

And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)

throwitaway222 7 hours ago

I want to live in a free society that has some level of justice.

ikrenji 6 hours ago

I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much

mayhemducks 6 hours ago

Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.

LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.

Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.

doright 10 hours ago

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.

And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)

I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.

Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.

I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.

It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.

Exoristos 7 hours ago

Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."

mayhemducks 5 hours ago

I'm sorry your parents sucked.

I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.

In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.

owisd 7 hours ago

We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.

kikoreis 8 hours ago

Wow, I realized today this is pretty crazy. but turns out it's old news, as old as Dec 2025, though the support page was only linked to in Jan 2026.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251223014541/https://support.c...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/protecting-well-being-of-user...

The ToS already prohibited it when it showed up back in Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225205440/

throwaw12 16 hours ago

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?

techblueberry 16 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 16 hours ago

Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.

layer8 16 hours ago

Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children.

Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.

matheusmoreira 16 hours ago

And parents are assumed to be responsible for their own children, not governments or corporations.

layer8 16 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago

> 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.

layer8 15 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago

> 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.

layer8 14 hours ago

So you’re saying that maturity should be completely disregarded? I don’t get your point.

matheusmoreira 14 hours ago

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.

eurothings 16 hours ago

> Mandatory warnings like for tobacco

lol that’ll work

jbs789 15 hours ago

brains develop with age, generally

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago

That doesn't nullify a person's ability to decide for themselves.

sdiupIGPWEfh 15 hours ago

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.

Muhammad523 15 hours ago

In fact, a 17-year-old is clueless while a person one year older isn't

CrazyStat 14 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 14 hours ago

The law could evaluate people as individuals instead of conjuring up some idiotic magic number.

CrazyStat 12 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira 12 hours ago

> 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.

CrazyStat 10 hours ago

Ok, but this doesn’t scale well. It takes a nontrivial amount of time to evaluate each person, and it would have to be done repeatedly as they age. You would need an entire government bureaucracy devoted to it. Then people will want an appeals process for when decisions don’t go their way—both parents and children.

Dylan16807 6 hours ago

99% of people are probably going to use the high school diploma route and not the demonstration route, so that's basically age with extra steps.

Aransentin 16 hours ago

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.

vlyan 6 hours ago

which, unfortunately, empowers the professional crybullies behind such articles further.

imagine the current year reaction to the Judas Priest trial. we'd have instagram newspeak like "unalive" in album titles and song lyrics from now on.

diydsp 16 hours ago

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.

varun_ch 16 hours ago

> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...

yunaflox 12 hours ago

Three words, anything but Claude.

dartharva 16 hours ago

Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.

rollypoley 16 hours ago

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.

fn-mote 15 hours ago

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.

metalcrow 13 hours ago

Then what's the reason behind this decision?

walrus01 15 hours ago

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

ACCount37 15 hours ago

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.

walrus01 15 hours ago

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.

ACCount37 15 hours ago

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.

pixl97 9 hours ago

Most people don't realize how tenuous the situation is with those open models too.

Right now as long as they play along with Xi it's all good. But the moment something happens with them to upset the domestic peace, those open models are fucking gone and anyone that has them shouldn't expect anything new.

throw10920 15 hours ago

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?

walrus01 15 hours ago

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.

ACCount37 12 hours ago

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.

kouteiheika 14 hours ago

> 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 asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply:

    On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring.

    **Background**
    - The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure.
    - What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support.
    - In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners.

    **June 3–4**
    - In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4.
    - Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4.
    - The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute.

    **Aftermath**
    - A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed.
    - Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed.
    - China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics.
    - The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law.

    Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history.
Sounds like... it happily mentions the brutally suppressed protest? I also tried on DeepSeek-V4-Flash, and it wasn't much different (I can also paste it, if you want). Both using vanilla weights (so no special uncensored flavor).

Dylan16807 6 hours ago

I know people like to instantly flag copied AI text but it's actually serving a point here, so I'm vouching at least.

CrazyStat 15 hours ago

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.

walrus01 15 hours ago

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".

baggachipz 15 hours ago

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.

herbst 15 hours ago

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.

f6v 15 hours ago

Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?

andy99 14 hours ago

  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

miki123211 14 hours ago

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.

Iolaum 14 hours ago

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.

walrus01 14 hours ago

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.

Aurornis 13 hours ago

> 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.

bigyabai 10 hours ago

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.

The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.

bjelkeman-again 9 hours ago

It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.

bigyabai 9 hours ago

That side of it is understandable, albeit open to interpretation. I can see how both sides justify their own choices in the short term.

But we hear this "dumping" argument quite often for seemingly arbitrary purposes. Is it "dumping" to sell cheap STM-32 clones when Arm LTD. won't let you buy a license? Is it "dumping" to sell $20,000 EVs to a nation that can barely build $30,000 EVs with federal and state subsidies? In many respects, China's cheap stuff is just better-suited to the global economy than America's high-margin products. If both countries are leveraging federal protectionism to promote and develop their products, it doesn't feel like State Owned Enterprises are on unfair footing compared to SpaceX or OpenAI.

Aurornis 8 hours ago

> Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing)

It's more likely that the API prices are highly profitable. I could see the subscription plans losing them money for some power users who actually use 100% every week, but given my past experience with subscription products I would estimate that their average utilization is far, far lower than in those comparisons where people take the tokens produced by exhausting the plan 100% and then compare to hypothetical API pricing.

As for economic dumping: The crucial difference is that there's usually some geopolitical influence happening, like government subsidies, incentives, or the government simply owning the companies directly and weaponizing their output even if the company runs at a loss.

lelanthran 9 hours ago

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?

throwaw12 9 hours ago

It is bad when it's done by nations outside of the West

When West does same, it is capitalism for the prosperity of everyone, healthy competition

Aurornis 8 hours ago

Selling a product below its cost of production can be done as a loss leader or market share tactic, but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them.

Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.

mswphd 4 hours ago

isn't blitzscaling essentially the same thing, except for when American companies do it (not always within their own country, e.g. spotify, netflix, or amazon)

jatora 4 hours ago

", but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them."

Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice

Dylan16807 6 hours ago

The problem isn't the goal, it's using vast money reserves to sell at a loss and hamper competition.

epolanski 6 hours ago

Somebody tell the Chinese companies to stop dumping AI, so US labs can keep burning pension funds money wrapped in VC checks fine dumping AI at a huge loss.

In any case I find the dumping argument stupid: they are giving both the model weights away and publishing in the open their results and how they got there.

Dylan16807 5 hours ago

I was just saying the general issue. This situation is much more complicated.

MisterMunchkin 5 hours ago

Isn't that just called a startup? It's not like openAI makes a profit.

Dylan16807 2 hours ago

Losing money as a company is fine. Losing money on each sale is often anti-competitive.

Scaled 9 hours ago

It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy.

The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)

Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.

reaperducer 15 hours ago

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.

fn-mote 15 hours ago

> 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.

matheusmoreira 14 hours ago

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.

sodapopcan 13 hours ago

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.

jawilson2 13 hours ago

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.

afavour 15 hours ago

> 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.

pllbnk 14 hours ago

LLMs are the fast food for the brain. I don't know how they can be used correctly.

micromacrofoot 14 hours ago

Who does?

tyre 14 hours ago

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.

chrisjj 15 hours ago

> Is AI bad for mental health?

Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.

WhyNotHugo 12 hours ago

It might not be about banning minors and just an excuse to get government ID / biometric face scan.

cruffle_duffle 12 hours ago

Dude, being able to run high quality models locally with cheap hardware can't some soon enough.

PeterStuer 10 hours ago

Would you believe it is all about the over 18s?

padolsey 15 minutes ago

Yet they are happy for Claude API endpoints to be used if your product is served to U18s. Don't be mistaken: this is a liability thing for Anthropic, not an ethical stance on model safety.

ssijak 15 hours ago

So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.

onlyrealcuzzo 14 hours ago

I agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...

Joel_Mckay 14 hours ago

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

00deadbeef 12 hours ago

What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.

Flavius 12 hours ago

Nothing can be as bad as modern social networks. Unless they start pushing manipulation, brain rot, gambling and porn into each AI answer.

system2 10 hours ago

I'd say nothing damaged me more than the 90s unrestricted internet and extreme sites.

BeFlatXIII 5 hours ago

How soon until someone earns a PhD for studying the harms of goatse?

epolanski 6 hours ago

I find both arguments asinine: why would socials for adults or outsourcing thinking by adults be good?

scronkfinkle 16 hours ago

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?)

walrus01 16 hours ago

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.

scronkfinkle 16 hours ago

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?

walrus01 16 hours ago

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.

scronkfinkle 15 hours ago

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.

hgoel 15 hours ago

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.

LadyCailin 14 hours ago

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.

hgoel 14 hours ago

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.

lukeschlather 11 hours ago

I think you aren't recognizing the harm of collecting this information. I might be okay with this if companies were banned from using age for targeted advertising.

However, the other harm is the recent IDScan hack which leaked 153M people's IDs. And regulation is not a solution here, we don't know how to implement a regulatory regime that will prevent these sorts of privacy disasters. Even if IDScan gets fines which kill the company (and I suspect they will not) it's not enough of a deterrent because no one will pay enough to actually provide proper security here.

1dom 15 hours ago

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.

asadotzler 11 hours ago

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.

astrobe_ 15 hours ago

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.

walrus01 15 hours ago

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.

astrobe_ 13 hours ago

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).

rokkamokka 16 hours ago

That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated

eagerpace 16 hours ago

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.

nixpulvis 15 hours ago

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.

hgoel 15 hours ago

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.

an0malous 15 hours ago

Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?

skybrian 15 hours ago

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.

woodrowbarlow 15 hours ago

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).

simoncion 14 hours ago

> 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.

skybrian 11 hours ago

Sure, the categories can be expanded. For example, movie ratings aren't just "children" and "adults." But explaining the simple case seemed like enough for one comment.

snarfy 9 hours ago

There could be lock levels to this. By default everything is unlocked (level = 0), but if a content provider / host receives a signal/header with lock-level > 0 they should be required to honor it. Something like this would require government which means it will probably never happen. Much more power asymmetry to just track you.

sajithdilshan 9 hours ago

> http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device

what happens when the request goes through a proxy and that proxy is configured to strip this header?

skybrian 7 hours ago

Websites that don't cooperate would need to be blocked by child-locked devices. That part wouldn't be any different from today.

sajithdilshan 6 hours ago

Do you even know what a proxy is? It has nothing to do with website cooperating or not

kragen 7 hours ago

The Web is HTTPS now, so that can only happen if either the origin server or the user trusts the proxy.

sajithdilshan 6 hours ago

User uses a proxy to bypass the client side validation, that’s the first thing I would have done as a teenager

kragen 7 hours ago

There should not be an HTTP header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. That puts the onus on the server to respect the header, and HTTP doesn't require any action on unrecognized headers. Also, it reveals to the server that the client's user is likely vulnerable to manipulation — exactly the opposite of what you want!

Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.

This standard has existed for 30 years and was supported in Internet Explorer 3; it's called PICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.

rajay99 7 hours ago

If you want to make a child-safe website that is OK, it can go be in it's walled garden g-rated brand-safe reality. But that is retarded. The rest of the internet still exists, and will not stop existing. Porn/defense distributed/much more insidious things will still exist.

All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.

f6v 15 hours ago

> 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.

asadotzler 11 hours ago

Absolutely. Of course. Is there any question about this? Do you see people advocating for something other than this?

cmiles74 14 hours ago

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.

kccqzy 8 hours ago

This kind of thinking just leads to an obvious analogy: alcohol. Alcohol is harmful to children and adults. Yet when the United States tried Prohibition it was rolled back. It turns out that people want to do things harmful to themselves.

emddudley 13 hours ago

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-...

japgolly an hour ago

> every OS developer

They exempted Linux, from what I remember reading.

00deadbeef 12 hours ago

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.

sajithdilshan 9 hours ago

The problem is that it would be a client side identity verification mechanism and won't work for websites.

As an example this would means that if this exists in iOS, everytime a safari loads a webpage it has to send this additional verification identifier as a header or a query param to the web server that serves the request and based on that the web server deny the request if the identifier is present (that means a minor is trying to access the web page).

But this client side identifier can easily be bypassed via a proxy that strips the identifier from the request because not matter it's configured in the OS of the device, ultimately request would just goes out as HTTP and that can be manipulated. That's why it has to be a server side verification of the age/identification.

MintPaw 6 hours ago

Doesn't this break if the child uses a VPN, or some other software to spoof? For this to really work Windows would have to lock down all HTTP, and really all networking, only allow approved software/browsers, etc. Is there a reason this wouldn't be the case?

pizzafeelsright 4 hours ago

I want to go back to having an IQ test to use the Internet.

dontreact 2 hours ago

Surprised to see that something many people are clamoring for (age verification for social media and ai usage) in many countries (eg Australia passed into law) for a good reason (studies showing the negative impact to teen mental health) is seen as only possibly due to some nefarious desire.

left-struck an hour ago

If you think about the history of abuse wrought upon the public by tech companies in regards to personal information, then the reaction really isn’t that surprising.

Are you really surprised that people are suspicious? Really?

xacky 8 hours ago

This will mean the next generation will grow up with open source AI. High schools and junior colleges offering computer courses will have to give their students different coding tools than the industry standard.

ghostpepper 8 hours ago

Or the industry standard will change

Aurornis 8 hours ago

Or they will use OpenAI, which allows guardians to complete age verification and enable work for kids age 13 to 17.

Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.

mpalmer 6 hours ago

Good, the less capable they are, the more students will actually have to learn.

sajithdilshan 6 hours ago

While they are at it maybe should learn to count with an abacus and send letters via pigeons

Dylan16807 6 hours ago

Those sound like perfectly good things to learn. Mental math and handling animals.

sajithdilshan 5 hours ago

For a medieval child

whazor 15 hours ago

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.

duskdozer 15 hours ago

And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.

stravant 13 hours ago

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.

Joel_Mckay 13 hours ago

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

asadotzler 11 hours ago

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.

seanmcdirmid 11 hours ago

The kid that learns, by the end of their education, to use the more advanced tools is going to economically out competed as an adult by the kid that got stuck learning how to do things the old fashioned way. Amish communities exist snd are productive, but they aren’t competing with graduates from Chinese universities.

I totally agree with the progression though. Learning the old ways (or cheap ways) can help understand the new ways, as long as you eventually progress to the new ways. China, for example, still tests a lot of Euclidean geometry on the gaokao (national tests) even if it is basically obsolete compared to trigonometry, but they have no better way of testing proof skills.

lirolero 9 hours ago

> The kid that learns, by the end of their education, to use the more advanced tools is going to economically out competed as an adult by the kid that got stuck learning how to do things the old fashioned way.

Source?

NichoPaolucci 15 hours ago

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.

vjulian 14 hours ago

That’s an excellent philosophy that ought be applied to your own child but not extended to others.

NichoPaolucci 12 hours ago

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.

vjulian 12 hours ago

That is an unnecessary default and also generalizes AI to the point of being analytically not useful.

win311fwg 13 hours ago

> 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.

Joel_Mckay 13 hours ago

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

chrisjj 10 hours ago

> ... at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality.

I'd not realised the ban covers child brains too. /i

sajithdilshan 9 hours ago

I think over time due the regulations like these younger generations in western countries like US/UK would fall far behind compared to the counterpart in India or China when it comes to AI fluency.

I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.

I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.

What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.

Patient0 14 hours ago

The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?

LUmBULtERA 14 hours ago

Yes, I'm wondering why it's upvoted like this is something new today. What's going on?

mdp2021 13 hours ago

Either people did not know or people believe it is still very relevant. (It is.)

sajithdilshan 11 hours ago

I guess people are just grasping on straws to hate on AI

khalic 13 hours ago

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

mdp2021 13 hours ago

> 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.

khalic 13 hours ago

yeah gonna correct to first one

kalkin 12 hours ago

If this is posted because it's "still relevant", the headline probably shouldn't say "no longer".

kalkin 12 hours ago

That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?

planb 16 hours ago

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.

frosty_lemon 15 hours ago

The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.

planb 14 hours ago

Oh, you're right, I did not look at the date. That explains it and seems to match the timeframe.

Aurornis 13 hours ago

> 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.

pr337h4m 16 hours ago

The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.

logicchains 16 hours ago

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.

onion2k 16 hours ago

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.

mdp2021 13 hours ago

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.

jbs789 15 hours ago

who is "they"? and why is this a desirable outcome exactly?

canelonesdeverd 14 hours ago

This level of psychosis makes me wonder if adults should be banned from using AI as well.

mdp2021 13 hours ago

> 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".

de-moray 16 hours ago

How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?

matheusmoreira 16 hours ago

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.

azan_ 15 hours ago

Children absolutely should have less agency than adults.

mdp2021 14 hours ago

"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".)

jbs789 15 hours ago

we are all incomplete human beings with limited agency. protecting minors us about understanding stages of development.

matheusmoreira 15 hours ago

I don't want or need governments and corporations to "understand" my development. I'll take care of that myself, thanks.

cmiles74 14 hours ago

The larger the list of thing minors cannot do, the more they will resent the constraints.

Hizonner 13 hours ago

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.

xpct 8 hours ago

Kids lack proper impulse control and sometimes make bad decisions if left unattended. It's preferable if we restrict certain dangerous actions from them.

Yes, LLMs can be dangerous for your own health if misused. Yes, I'd be furious if I was 14 and got my Claude access revoked.

As others have said in this thread, I'd add that this should primarily be the parents' responsibility since they know their child best.

BeFlatXIII 5 hours ago

Treating children and teenagers as the same group is out of control.

tehwebguy 13 hours ago

> 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!

Retro_Dev 4 hours ago

I used a similar (same?) service that claimed no data was uploaded and "all processing happens on-device"... I decided to record network packets with wireshark and found out the tool DID upload a significant amount of data (about 2 megabytes) through its lifetime. I wouldn't trust these tools farther than you can throw them.

zoobab 15 hours ago

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.

pendenthistory 14 hours ago

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.

zoobab 14 hours ago

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.

pendenthistory 14 hours ago

You may be joking but there are plenty of people in this thread that basically believe this

micromacrofoot 11 hours ago

they're harmful for everyone

japgolly an hour ago

Aren't AI's already G-rated cos of the built-in guardrails?

jeroenhd 15 hours ago

"May 18, 2026" is right there next to the title. Nothing changed.

mdp2021 14 hours ago

Policy enforcement has been that if the bot guessed the user was a minor it interrupted communication.

tidbeck 13 hours ago

Seems related but not exactly what was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633

jeroenhd 11 hours ago

Your link is explaining an addendum on the link OP posted.

My guess is that OP got their account flagged as being a minor and posted the link in either surprise or (understandable) outrage after finding out that Claude has been asking people for ID.

keel-control 4 hours ago

Why don't we have privacy respecting ZKP Age IDs yet (at least in the EU)? Could someone tell me what the hold up is.

I wish I could paste this as a prompt into a Codex Swarm and have it solve the government...

At least that would have more immediate impacts that the naiver stokes equations

dakolli 36 minutes ago

ZKPs would defeat the purpose of age verification, the point being to track your activity online so governments can do precrime and make sure no group can ever use technology to organize and challenge existing power structures so this will never happen.

Should be a thing stores sell for $5.00 or whatever, show your ID (not scanned) get a code you can use to verify. This obviously has flaws, but the point of age verification isnt to protect kids, the world is ran by literal pedophiles.

drewg123 13 hours ago

My gmail account is old enough to drink. Too bad that doesn't count for something..

TutleCpt 16 hours ago

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.

mdp2021 14 hours ago

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".

edukite 16 hours ago

And TikTok is not available for minors in Poland yet a know 11y old who publish there so yeah, good to pretend

ozlikethewizard 16 hours ago

and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.

logicchains 16 hours ago

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".

techblueberry 16 hours ago

The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.

IslandRebel 16 hours ago

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.

egorfine 14 hours ago

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.

umuttalha0 16 hours ago

if claude ask me verification i will drop using it thats it

gitowiec 13 hours ago

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)

kelvinjps10 8 hours ago

Good I already canceled my antrhopic subscription. Switched to chatgpt and openrouter credits and my experience is so much better. If openai does the same it will be just openrouter.