Yep this is what caused me to switch to Anthropic from OpenAI a few months back, couldn't use any model newer than GPT-4 even if I paid for credits, unless I did a biometric check. I guess I'll move to perplexity or deepseek or something if anthropic flags me for the same.

That's almost certainly just bad engineering/bad business. Not to say it wasn't an active choice, I'm sure it was. It just shows how extreme the power imbalance is between end users and big business that they have 0 desire to do things correctly and end users have 0 impact on correcting that thinking.

Anthropic claim that if you have a verification issue, they will give you support; remains to be seen what that will actually come down to

Or make a new account?

That is a really terrible design.

I dealt with a few instances of online ID verification recently, and in my experience, they don't close your application when your photo is not clear. They mark it as "awaiting customer response" and kindly ask you to upload again.

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or you can scan you retina using sam altmans device and get access immediately /s

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> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality

From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.

These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.

Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.

Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.

In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums.

Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

This is gonna bite the US long term very bad.

With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.

Maybe because all the predictions of the very vocal net neutrality crowd didn't manifest. It got memory holed and life just moved on. The only outcome was maybe a few cell phone carriers bumping your bandwidth limits for netflix streaming

Isn't that because America has gone full fascist and a lot of white collar people fear the 'permanent underclass' and would rather buy lube than 'resist'

what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?

Net neutrality is about the public infrastructure. This is a private company. I'm not happy with what Anthropic is doing, but it's a very large and obvious difference.

This link should be at the top.

Meanwhile, apologia from the impartial influencer contingent is surely on its way to convince you "no! Persona IDV being allowed to train on my PII [0] is a GOOD thing! PLEASE don't vote with your wallet!"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777291

I agree. Given the very recent Discord pullback, this feels forced upon Anthropic.

I suspect that Anthropic had to select from a set of government approved ID verifiers.

Considering Thiel's clout in the current govt's inner circle...3 out of the 4 choices would have been duds. Leaving the 4th as Persona, the only viable option

That's the problem with all these heuristics i guess. No one but phd historians and kids writing essays research inter-war Soviet history.

Which is of course false, but you can imagine that's what the heuristics say is true 90% of the time.

We're gonna lose quite a long tail of interests and hobbies when the llms take over

I suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government to re-enable Fable. Whatever "safety/security" measures the government requires of Anthropic will no doubt also be applied to other US "AI providers", perhaps based on assessed model capability. Apparently OpenAI already had an ID check in place before this.

What's going to be interesting is how the US government regulates US-based access to Chinese AI models, whether served domestically (e.g. GLM-5.2 from Amazon Bedrock, DeepInfra, etc), or from overseas.

I suppose if one fear is US domestic terrorists/hackers using AI, then restricting access to all models, regardless of country of origin, might make sense, but as far as restricting technology exports over national security concerns it wouldn't make much sense to restrict access to foreign models!

Crudely applied restrictions are likely to get worse before they potentially get better as the hype wears down and AI risk gets better assessed, but government control tends to be a one-way ratcheting up, so who knows. It's not inconceivable that the government may try to restrict use of local models too, which they could do by making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.

It seems very likely that AI tools like this will end up with citizenship verification whether it’s American, Chinese, or European. Governments are going to want to know when you try and plan an assassination, or develop a novel pathogen, or start writing manifestos that go against the orthodoxy. And they’re going to want to make sure if you are a criminal or deemed to be one you can’t keep up in the economy due to neutered AI access.

I’m not condoning this, just speculating.

likely mythos class models at first, but i wouldn't put it past them to expand that to the cyber verification program, or similar

It’s all over the place. A UK bank i’d been with 7+ years for a business savings account suddenly started demanding ID or they would “limit” access (lock my money up until I dance to their tune). They already have all this. My identity nor address have changed in 15 years. The account is super low activity savings. Zero possible red flags.

The verification process started out as “just a photo of my driving licence” - turned out to be a video recording of my whole environment with no obvious previous mention or disclaimer of this. Then the requirement for a “quick selfie” suddenly appeared (pretends to be a photo but is full video again), I complied up until the “do you want your data processed by AI or the lowest bid in India?”

I noped out there, moved all the cash straight out (6 figures) and closed the account. They are now on my personal “blacklist”.

Opened a new building society account, which is all paper based for ID. I shall be opening many more such building society accounts that only deal in paper for ID purposes in the coming weeks.

100% the exact second I get some popup telling me to upload documents to continue is when claude pro gets decommissioned.

Yes, it’s the biometrics they’re after.

Wouldn't want the government to have your government-issued ID.

I have no idea about Persona though.

I cancelled too, unfortunately! And like Louis Rossman has been saying recently about Anthropic, the folk are "Bad people". The Persona partnership also cements that. I finally have an excuse (need) to test the other high-end coding models on the scene - and might save myself close to 200 per month at the same time for a possible win.

Serving barely useful GLM 5.2 costs what? $15k? Actually useful is like $50k? You’ll never recoup the cost unless you ‘locally’ means ‘inference provider is not the model provider’?

It will. Moves like this will only lead to a drift of brains and talents to tweak & tune open harnesses and open models.

There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...

"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."

Probably easier than with a person. A company has incorporation documents which exist in an already-verified public registry and have dates and other information.

Doesn't say anything about age.

How does a dark lord born before the beginning of time verify its age?

Worth noting that posting LLM-generated comments violates the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

(Detractors: I encourage you to turn "showdead" on in your HN settings and view its other comments before you jump to defense!)