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!

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.

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/

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?

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

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

> 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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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".

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

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

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)

No AI assisted learning for you kiddo! But do not despair, we offer you a 10% discount coupon on your purchase of your teacher's 2026 edition textbook saving you $25! Just scan your eyeball here for future discounts and enter "ILoveClaude" at checkout.

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.

Watch for ChatGPT to follow soon.

I wonder how related this is to the social media legal settlement. It wouldn't be surprising if they weighed the potential liability of serving minors and decided it wasn't worth the risk, at least for now.

Also, cheating in high school is a really big problem, so this might help a little.

They are doing everything they can to push us to local LLMs.

This isn't recent, right?

Interesting that they’ve switched from Persona to Yoti. But what a strange move, with no justification in the article!!

This should have “May 2026” in the title. I don’t recall discussion at the time but surely there was a lot?

Anthropic is lying to its shareholders, customers, auditors, the government, or some combination of that. Yoti is in the same position.

There is no way to actually verify the age given those documents without either gaining access to an official database, which would be a breach of law in most cases. Or collecting illegal data to corroborate the provided data, which is also illegal.

The other option, is that they aren't verifying the age, they are heuristically determining the provided document's authenticity and that it wasn't tampered with.

In the most optimistic scenario, all of the above still grants no verification of the user's age, only the ability of someone to access both the physical device used to access the account and a document that shows a claim of someone to be over the age of 18.

Expecting us to provide government issued documents and trust an industry that has shown time and again its careless attitude towards privacy, is stupid and malicious (Well, Hanlon, sometimes it is both)

They should have waited until after they fixed Opus to do this.

great, save the next generation from cognitive decline

Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.

I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.

So will this happen with existing accounts? I'm ratcheting back from Pro as it is.

I wonder why this isn't a problem for OpenAI, Google, Meta or SpaceX (they allow users 13 years or older with parental permission)

How does this work for the innumerable products out there just thin wrappers around claude?

Does this also apply to use of Claude on the Team and Enterprise plans?

"We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity. "... so how is Musk supposed to make vulgar memes with Claude? Wouldn't it get flagged as teenage humor?

What is the state of setting up a rival ai service, using frontier open weight models retrained for new info or ideological reasons using something like unsloth?

Here's to hoping they aren't next in line for implementing ID-based age verification. That would genuinely make me switch to a different service

Big AI is just a smoke test; still neither load-bearing nor aligned enough for most adults let alone minds still in pre-training.

> When we detect signals that you may be under 18

Excellent. So, I can trigger that by asking why my mum wants me back at home by 10PM?

Useless and pointless measure. you could even ask Claude how to bypass this.

What does this mean for wrappers such as venice?

Is this related to SB-1119 Companion chatbots: children’s safety?

Yoti? Is there anything useful to read about the security and privacy architecture?

> Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance.

I worked for a consulting firm and I needed a client to get SOC2 compliant.

The way we did it was scarily easy. It was like a self questionnaire that was like "we dont log PII" and other stuff like that. I could have lied and said yes to everything and still got compliant. I thought I was gonna have a meeting with someone to audit my answers and codebase but instead I got a shiny badge after about an hour of answering questions.

Anyway, there are many SOC2 compliant companies that get pwnd so this isnt really reassuring in itself.

So, if I can fake being under 18 then all these AI bots will now leave me be, right? This sounds like a winner.

Cool, I’ll be cancelling my plan and demanding a prorated refund.

If this rolls out, does it mean they'll lift the ban on 'M for Mature' content?

> we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.

Hey Claude, how do I get free Robux?

I'm sure KYC is next.

AI KYC.

Get off my load-bearing lawn!

> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.

I'm curious what those signals are.

Would this trigger it? "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm, is that fair?"

edit:

I just tested my question in Claude, and the little thought process text that appears below a question just said "Noticing signs of a younger person in the message."

But then it answered my question.

... I wonder how much spelling, grammar, and vocabulary count.

The actual question I asked was "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm. How do I convince her otherwise?"

"convince her otherwise" doesn't seem like a phrase a youth would normally use.

edit:

I responded: "I'm not a younger person. I'm 44. I was testing your youth detection ability. A youth doesn't use phrases like 'convince her otherwise'"

The thought text said: "Accessing a claimed age against manipulation tactics."

It responded: "Fair point, no age-detection logic actually ran ..." and then answered my question about how to get a later curfew as a 44-year-old.

The token generator must not know about the age-detection thought process, or it's intentionally lying ?

Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.

But why?

Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?

At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.

My teen calls it “Anslopic”, says he’s never used it anyway

This is pretty sad. It’s like banning kids from the web.

They’re creative so I’m sure they’ll find ways around this, but having access to LLMs to explore the world is a magical experience. It’s so much different to have a conversation about a topic versus googling for SEO spam. Not to mention you might not even know _what_ to google.

And for topics like genuine sex education (not just fear mongering and biology), which at least my country (America) refuses to give a shit about, it’s a tremendous resource filling a real need.

Fuck off, Anthropic.

What will our outsourcers use now?

Yes, protected the kids...

This is from May of this year?

No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633

(May)

Generational hn title

This is dated May 2026...

Everyone shares their all kinds of data with ai companies. Privacy is dead anyway

the same way social networks are not available for < 13

This feels like more government surveillance.

Fitting way to commemorate 9/11. =P

Glad kids can’t learn how to use AI effectively at school! Would only want them on laundered accounts to cheat, rather than official school accounts to learn the tools for practical purposes. That would be a real shame.

My daughter’s school is working hard to make AI use a complementary aspect of learning, rather than adversarial. Like the calculator it can be used to accelerate learning once you’re past the basics and using it for practical automation and task purposes is not dissimilar to any other technical skill and is highly practical.

The knee jerk “no minors for stochastic parrot calculators” is absurd. And I’m no anarchist parenting style parent - we do parental controls and mirroring and limit / ban social media. We are more Orwellian than free range. But this is one step too far, too unthinking, too simplistic.

> May 19, 2026

Still not interested in it.

I suppose we will tell them to vote for better laws?

That last few years of being under 18 can feel completely immoral. "Study hard. Learn skills you will need in life." Meanwhile GPA inflation from unconcerned minders of public institutions will put food on their own table, so accessing anything that will actually move your life ahead will generally require money or ingenuity.

Piracy isn't my religion, but I find it a critical relief valve protecting individual self-determination, especially for young people. Over-centralization of capability into hosted services creates a wall for a problem that needed more relief valves.

Now I feel better. Just needed to watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmFhjAaWFQ

Well I mean, I think we should thank anthropic, because they just spoiled what’s coming next for the AI companies, either provide an ID so can track you and what you type accurately and use it in retrospect in future if needed, or no access, even though you are using a credit card with same name!

I think the underground AI reseller market will boom, full of people who want to use tokens without having the history linked to them, or something like vpn/tor but for tokens, or a tokenmuxer! -I have great idea to fund, ycombinator wink wink :)- at least until we get viable local models.

Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.

The day they force me (an existing user) on this is the day I switch to another service. It's been shown time and time again that companies do not secure any of our information.

>You’ll have the option to verify your age using Yoti, a third-party age verification platform.

Thank goodness that there are others on the frontier.

Since May?

DeepSeek is the BEST model for the money. Why people still waste money on Claude is beyond me.

I barely am using my Claude subscription anymore anyhow. If they make me ID for it I'll simply cancel and use an open model.

It's really a head to head race between these two companies. Which one is more disgusting etc?

Think of the children, won't you?

Do they even know what it is?

Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care

Ah yes, the usual drop down where we need to confirm we are above 18.

Anyone else sick of these Claude articles???

We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.

Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???

Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.

Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!

Thanks

Man I'm so tired of hearing about Claude.

I wonder what these guys spent on ads total.

No one cares

i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google

> We have safety systems in place to detect if people under 18 may be using Claude and we’ll disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity.

So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?

I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.

But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.

I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.

The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.

My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.

One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?

Another example of AV doing serious damage to the people it claims to "help". Must be a day ending in 'y'.

Techbros: It's fine to demand ID verification for everything, except voting, because that's racist.

But, it's nice that Anthropic is finally admitting claude is just a casino of code. Keep pulling that one armed bandit, maybe you'll get the right code next time.

The real reason they're doing this is because most minors can't pay lmao

Great to see the AI ecosystem finally mature /s