alt Hacker NewsClaude is only available to people over 18 years
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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.
Aren't AI's already G-rated cos of the built-in guardrails?
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
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.
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.
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!