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Comments (418)

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  data-ottawa
  The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.
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  tgsovlerkhgsel
  Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.
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  JimDabell
  OpenAI also has this kind of check. What is especially bad is that if you fail the verification process, they won’t let you retry – you are permanently locked out from the top models. They aren’t clear about this upfront during the process, so make sure the lighting is good when you scan your ID!https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...
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  xmstan
  Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...
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  truthbe
  Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searchinghttps://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund
• Aurornis
  This page has been up since April: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.
• nedt
  At the very least I would expect them to support eID for everyone who can and doesn't want their 3rd party. Also much better than take a video of plastic card.
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  sinker
  Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.
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  p0w3n3d
  A phone or a computer with a camera: you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone, or your webcam A blood probe might be required as usb dongle to test your blood sample. We're working on stool sampling mechanism as well. Your house might be monitored with one or more armed drones to prevent any tampering with your WiFi and cable connection
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  dsign
  > Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.
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  consumer451
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633 - 67 days ago, 100 commentsAs mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.Discord dropped them after user backlash.
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  827a
  Its a very well known fact that all of our geopolitical adversaries have sophisticated fake American ID markets. This doesn't stop any of the most dangerous adversaries from getting access to systems protected by this technology. DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts and keep on keeping on. This just hurts normal people, Americans and non-Americans, who might struggle to authenticate or be disallowed because of their place of birth. Pointless CYA, and beneath a research group whose intention is to invent the machine god.
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  dvduval
  So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM. Maybe a political candidate for the opposing party has something embarrassing there for example.
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  Rooster61
  I really don't like that headlines have been surfacing about the US government putting pressure on Anthropic, and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).I may very well stop using Claude due to this.Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.
• giancarlostoro
  I am reminded of the time Discords support desk was compromised where hackers had access to the data of anyone who ever had to give their support channels their ID. Are we sure we trust this third party to not be compromised? Is Anthropic allowing non-US citizens access to this data? Are they in countries where they could be bribed over access to this data much like in Discords case?I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
• userbinator
  I wonder how good AI now is at generating plausible-looking identity documents, photos, and videos of a virtual identity...
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  zaptheimpaler
  AI is weapons now. Need a gun license to buy and operate pistols (Opus), assault rifles (Fable) will be highly limited, even higher tiers of weapons will only be accessible by corporate and state-level actors - we might not even know they exist or what they're capable of. Democratization of AI is dead. Gen pop is completely asleep to all of this so its going to get locked down in the name of safety before anyone even wakes up.
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  neosat
  Anthropic is really on a tricky path here. When you have had runaway success due to a hit it is easy to believe that it is the natural way of things. However, that happened due to unique convergence of tech paradigm shift, the competitive landscape, and how they were positioned to capture that value through claude code.They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'. While it's an admirable internal quality for the company to have, their treatment of their user base (developers, users) has been bordering on indifference and their stance bordering on arrogance.As competition heats up, there is a very real chance of them shooting themselves in the foot with friction such as this (to be fair not completely in their control but also they had their share of responsibility that led to this)
• dwa3592
  I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.
• I_am_tiberius
  I just hope there's huge protest. I hope people just cancel the subscription. I fear people will just accept the terms. The result will be a kill switch for the US government and a clean distinction between national and foreign users so spying will become legal. Surely Anthropic hasn't allowed the NSA connect so far, - openai clearly did (see their board members).
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  g42gregory
  I am not sure what is the purpose of this. If you are paying with a credit card, they already have your fully verified identity through the bank's KYC, fully protecting Anthropic legally.Corporate accounts, in the US, will have full personal identification through the corresponding company's HR.
• redbell
  > We are rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and you might see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.I'd like to know what capabilities/features/plans that need ID verification as it is unclear for me right now. Also, this would become a true barrier in the future if they apply this for every account regardless of the features being used.> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguardsSince I read I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245), I, somehow, start feeling very uncomfortable with ID verification as it appears there are actually many players processing my personal data, not just Persona.
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  chickensong
  Oh good, uploading your ID and selfie to the much-hated Persona. What could possibly go wrong?
• _bobm
  I find it funny that some comments are arguing why "the innocent users have to fall victims, becoming/ being collateral damage" to this american governmental whim and thus being deprived of access to these models.But hold on, collateral to what? Is this "our own personal jesus" access that we cannot live without or what?People don't and cannot learn how to code or what? We don't know how to think?I am calling their bluff. Fill your own gddam datacenters with "meaning".Panta rei.
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  Artoooooor
  Every time I consider renting a service from Anthropic, they drop such bomb. Full capability with pre-agreed price per token and no ID verification. That's what I demand.
• lofaszvanitt
  Ridiculous theatre.
• rzk
  > How are we verifying?> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partnerSee this related thread regarding Persona:OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 - Feb 2026 (206 comments)
• sebiw
  MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB RAM + oMLX|LM Studio|Llama.cpp|etc. + Opencode|etc. + Models from DeepSeek|Qwen|Google. There are alternatives to centralized, cloud-based LLMs!
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  gravity2060
  One of my frustrations with this is for those of us who allow our under-18 year old children access to our account. If we want our kids to code with ai-assist, my read of the “ban-if-under-18” means I risk my indispensable pro account by giving my kids claude code on their laptops now. Is this a correct reading?
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  Overpower0416
  Yeah, not happening. Gonna hope for the open models getting better and staying with what I've got for now.
• fizlebit
  How is it going to work for corporate customers. What if one us employee writes claude output into a ticket, can that be read by a non us citizen employee? What about paraphrased?
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  dofm
  Ohhh Emm Gee, the HN singularity has arrived.chuckling in slightly mischievous BritishJeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?
• nightshift1
  When i tried to upgrade from 5x to 20x a few months ago, they froze my account until i sent them a full 3d scan of my face and a photo of my id. The only way i could deny was to cancel my account. So this is nothing new for them.
• maccard
  So apparently the UK and Europe are sleepwalking into an identity collection en masse by the state and yet…
• aucisson_masque
  Alright, I'm off Claude.That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.How could they do that ?
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  jacomoRodriguez
  Just canceled my subscription. I don't want my id data end up with persona and/or the us gov.
• noiv
  Interestingly Persona offers an attribution process (“verified” or “not verified”) and no data is held. Why does Anthropic want a selfie?
• yuzuquat
  I'm curious how multiple accounts come into play here. Does anyone know?
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  dom96
  I don't mind this, what I do mind is that there is still no way to verify my identity without giving private information to third parties. Why aren't governments building zero knowledge proof-based solutions to this?
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  othmanosx
  Just run the /insights command on your Claude and see what it gives you, you'd be shocked what it knows about you just talking to it.
• sph
  How does it work in business settings? Is your employer going to send your ID information to Claude?
• AnotherGoodName
  From that thread.>The OP post is misinformation. The policy page has been unchanged since April 16 (including the words Updated this week) and has to do with verifying if you're an adult if they suspect the account is used by an under 18, which we all already know Anthropic is doing.https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.c...So this isn't new right?
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  aqua_coder
  This might seem unrelated but on one of my free accounts. I tried to make Claude do some historical fact checking on the inter-war period of the USSR. The point isn't if it is true or not, but it felt like it would help quite a lot to see what the sources Claude finds says about the both sides of the picture and I was curious at some point.Funnily enough, a day after this my account got banned under the pretext that I was a child using Claude and that I would need to verify my account. The age verifier said that it doesn't store my photos or anything. It gets cheeky though and indirectly it says it doesn't store what I upload but sends it to third parties that do store and sell it. Its like saying I won't steal your money, but I will give it to the thief right over there for free. Now the flagging might be entirely coincidental, but I just exported my chats and just never went on with the intention to re verify my account (since it is a free one basically and there is no incentive for me to do so). Weirdly enough, I started to see my past chat history that I exported to check and see if there is any correlation between how I talked and if there might have been some instances in which the system might attribute said message as what a young person would say. Though from the looks of it, it didn't give any of that sort of vibe.
• throwaw12
  I hope EU bans US models and adopts Chinese models, since US models seems to be a clear threat to EU sovereignty, while Chinese models can be deployed anywhere
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  padjo
  Not a chance i'll be handing my id over to Persons. So what are the alternatives for AI coding these days?
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  labrador
  ID verification might be a path to allow restricted access to Fable (doesn't mention nationality yet), but I concluded I don't need Fable, which excels more at technical work, because I do therapy/recovery/lifecoach work which Opus is good at. I'm retired and need personal "executive function" type assistance.
• hmate9
  Not defending this, and it's far from ideal, but also credit card details were already pretty much confirming identities already.
• phreack
  Makes one ponder how there really is no moat. If this rolls out as implied, it is immediately easy to switch providers, and I will.
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  g42gregory
  Here is what I think it the game is:1. Force KYC is US LLM providers, gleefully supported by the US LLM providers.2. Next -> now Chinese LLM providers must use KYC in the "free market" Western world.3. But we can's allow KYC information to go to China, can we?4. Now Western customers can not access Chinese LLM5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.
• octagons
  I’ve only seen vague suggestions of what is actually being gated through this verification. Is there a more definitive explanation of what will require the verification?Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.
• maxprimes
  Yeah that'll be a pass for me.
• jasonvorhe
  Not gonna happen. I'll just just more of the Chinese models then. Digital I'd is a clear no from me.
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  Amir6
  I’ve been waiting for days for an appeal decision on a suspension that I have zero clue on why it happened! I’m trying very hard not to hate Anthropic right now!https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
• rzerowan
  How does this play aout in the current realm of ID verifiation laws sweeping across most of the EU and US. As usual is using 'protect the children' : UK,AuS, FR for social media and Operating Systems while also pushing 'national security' : this current iteration. End result seems to be total end of online anonymity while the data slurpers and data brokers continue plying their trade uninterrupted.
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  bnj
  > We are not collecting more than we needWhy does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?
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  RaSoJo
  Is there any info on what these "certain capabilities" are?
• photios
  I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D
• oceanwaves
  I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock
• zeafoamrun
  Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.
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  dpkirchner
  I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?
• dwa3592
  Are they paying Persona identities in Haiku credits? Is that why they chose them? It was only 4 months ago that company was dropped by discord.
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  comboy
  They all have everyone ID's through payments already..
• 13415
  I'm glad I don't use Claude.
• SXX
  Come on guys, just give your ID, passport data and photo (since it scans NFC) to Persona. After all Peter Thiel is the most trustworthy supplier of tech in US used to kill people using drones with AI including face recognition.Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
• fidotron
  One dimension of this which isn't discussed enough is this opens the road to inference providers silently discriminating against different users who will remain oblivious to what's going on. i.e. if you "fail" ID verification it's actually good that they tell you as opposed to serving you a malicious model instead.
• AtNightWeCode
  Why use Persona? Most countries have real services for identifying users. Same services that are used when you pay online or do your taxes. At the end it does not really matter I guess. American cloud services are compromised and can no longer be trusted.
• zwaps
  Oh no that’s terrible. They even say the data is used by the external company to train and use however.Shit now i have to cancel my account
• tamimio
  I don’t know since when it became acceptable and normalized to provide government ID to some corporate, and your data are under the mercy of a random employee, manager, revised policy, or predator investors? No, never. I only provide my government ID to the government that I voted for, or I can hold it accountable if anything goes wrong.
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  macic
  Very disappointing that they went with Persona, the company whose CEO regularly argues with people on Twitter and lies about their arguments.
• general1465
  This further confirms that self hosted LLM are the future. Today it is ID verification, tomorrow it will be only for US citizens and day after tomorrow only for US citizens who can get "Secret" clearance.
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  usernamed7
  Let us hope this only accelerates the proliferation of local models
• fithisux
  The coding capabilities they offer, are their own.This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.We knew that from the start.
• dang
  (Submitted URL was https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_... - we changed that to what looks like the original source, but put the Reddit link in the toptext for context.)
• mounz
  This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after
• kylehotchkiss
  On the bright side maybe less people will use AI as a therapist if every thought they dump into it is now associated to their ID and home address
• cute_boi
  > We are not collecting more than we need. We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity.You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?
• Alien1Being
  This is a big win for LLMs from China and to a much lesser extent from Europe.I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.
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  gcanyon
  If this is what it takes to get access to Fable I'll be sad, but go along with it. Fable was (at least in my testing) remarkably good.
• llm_nerd
  While this seems related to recent events, this page has been there for months. They have used it when they think an account is underage.We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
• spprashant
  Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.
• kingkongjaffa
  Since the end is near does anyone have a claude data export flow/tool they have used?I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.
• aftbit
  How long can they retain my identity information? I didn't see an answer to that in the post - did I just miss it, or are they being purposefully obtuse?
• nailer
  > you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phoneThey've been generating these with AI since 2023 (and likely earlier, but that's the first time I heard it being used in the wild).Photo ID is a real person (your hotel maid took photos) iPhone headroll is generated to match the real photo ID with AI.
• rvz
  No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.Never been a better time to use local models.
• phendrenad2
  This is an old page that pre-dates the Fable situation. Seems people only discovered it recently though.Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago
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  skywhopper
  It will never stop amusing me that an expired ID is invalid for verification. How does that negate my identity? Particularly my age.
• anon
  undefined
• monksy
  Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.
• surume
  Please God let a model or company as capable as Claude/Anthropic come along soon that doesnt require ID so that we don’t all end up as uncreative mind slaves.
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  fortran77
  Where are these "certain capabilities" documentes?
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  ares623
  Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI."Hey, maybe social media shouldn't be made available to children. Let's add some age checks maybe?" "Reee noo that's invasion of privacy it's a slippery slope""Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"
• petre
  Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.
• jauntywundrkind
  So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.
• jbverschoor
  > How your data is protectedIt's not
• jjice
  I mean, this feels exactly what had to happen after their announcement with Fable being restricted by the US government since the requirement is that they need to know you're a US citizen. You can argue this is Anthropic's fault due to their Mythos/Fable fear mongering, but at the end of the day this is a requirement by the US government to use this (and likely future models).I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.Best I can do is root for local models (already was), but I'll keep my Anthropic subscription for their "lesser" models without an ID (for now).
• SilverElfin
  > Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.AI is all about information and therefore about speech. If you need to identify yourself to access information or ask questions, it undermines freedom. Anthropic is on the wrong side of history.
• BoredPositron
  It's annoying but ok in general to verify age of your users. The problem for me is mainly how and what vendor they use. They picked the worst possibilities.
• holoduke
  For certain capabilities one can use uncensored models which can be found on huggingface. It's perfect for asking on how to create atomic bombs, meth labs, assassination plans, brute force hack scripts and more. You only need one or two h200 cards.
• shevy-java
  YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.
• anon
  undefined
• jimmydoe
  ffs do it and give me fable.
• jchw
  lol, absolutely not.
• dev1ycan
  Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id
• ur-whale
  One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".
• greatgib
  So convenient so that the day that you go to visit USA or Trump has a grief against you, we can immediately identify your accounts and inspect all your life!
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  Razengan
  Fuck.. How did y'all in the Land of the Free let it get this way
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  jingpostmedia
  Worth noting that China implemented mandatory real-name verification for generative AI services back in 2023. The practical effect wasn't just about preventing misuse -- it created a two-tier system where verified users get full capabilities while others get heavily restricted outputs. What's interesting is how quickly the market adapted: local open-source models partly flourished because they sidestep these requirements. Western providers are now walking a similar path, but without the digital identity infrastructure China already had in place.
• randomuser558
  [dead]
• antimony51
  [dead]
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  throw-the-towel
  [flagged]
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  badgersnake
  How does a company verify its age?
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  nickandbro
  I understand how this can be incredibly frustrating to non-US users or people who would like to remain anonymous. But from an enforcement perspective makes sense. If someone is able to leverage a jail break to break into a classified system, the government needs to easily be able to track down who that person is.