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.
They clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with.
This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.
If K2 or GLM 5.2 are on par with Opus 4.8 I'll eat my hat. They're good, but they're not that good. Deepseek V4 Pro has been better than Sonnet for me, but the only model that comes close to or surpasses Opus 4.8 is GPT-5.5.
Yes and no. The hot moment I tried Fable that thing gave reviews so good I was already considering automation to cut a review for every PR in the company. Its coding abilities though were not that good.
> 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.
That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.
My understanding was that until they can make sure it cannot be weaponized against the US, only US citizens will be allowed to use it.
(Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)
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
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!
Thankfully, OpenAI's check is not required if you use their models through OpenRouter!
This didn't use to be the case (OpenRouter's OpenAI access used to be bring-your-own-key), but they've reached some sort of deal with them a couple months ago, and now you can access all the GPT-5 series models on OR with no verification at all.
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.
OpenAI has notoriously terrible engineering. Look no further than the numerous Reddit threads and YouTube videos about people trying to give them money for their services and being denied. Users routinely have to try a number of credit cards, a number of web browsers, a number of devices, and a number of physical locations.
I’m not talking about sketchy prepaid cards from weird banks on a VPN in a country the United States doesn’t do business with. I’m talking about Americans getting their Chase cards rejected on their home wifi in Ithaca.
When this initially happened to me, I assumed it was a one off thing, but I was shocked to have found out that it’s been going on for at least six months, probably longer.
Anthropic is no better if the yardstick is complaints about these topics on reddit. The main thing Anthropic seems to add above and beyond OpenAI is overbilling (that also gets the talk-to-the-hand treatment).
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.
Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the
mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
> Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
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.
If you haven’t talked to Anthropic support yet you’re in for a surprise. I’m an engineer at a company with an enterprise contract, Anthropic people in our slack and it took me a month to get a response on my support request, I just decided it wasn’t worth it and bought a second phone number rather than wait.
That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
> That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
They already reversed course on that decision a couple of days later. Trivial to find a source, but Fable is also rather notably not available to the public right now, so it's not actually a relevant threat.
excuse me but, is this trivial source you're referring to the url included in the post you're responding to, or did they reverse back to the original intent of keeping refusals quiet?
That's a decent moderation, shadowban is a totally different thing. AFAIK, your karma is enough to vouch that Flagged topics or comments and return that piece into a regular displaying.
Reddit is the only platform that actually tells you that you are shadowbanned, so at least they are upfront about it, but their appeal system sucks. My friend just appealed every day for just over 600 days and finally got their account un-shadowbanned.
No, they have fully banned and shadowbanned. If you are shadowbanned you can login and check the appeals page but your posts and comments will no longer be visible. If you are fully banned you cannot log in.
The whole point of an identity check is that they know exactly who you are. If you tell them who you are and you fail the identity check, you can’t simply create a new account because when you go through the identity check for a second time you’ll still need to tell them exactly who you are, at which point they can match the new account to the original failure.
An empty account and an account with a year of history have very different weights in this - most people already have an account tied to their legal name, paid for with a credit card in that same legal name. Throw in some geo-location, browser fingerprinting, etc. to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name.
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am.
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
Fun fact, if you're celebrity you get a special customer support phone number at most major corporations EG Apple because "Hi I'm Taylor Swift" gets tried a lot.
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...
THe reason why its not being talked about like net neutrality is because there aren't large companies with a vested interested interest in changing the status quo
Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners.
The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.
> 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.
The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas.
That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.
The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
> The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework.
I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer:
"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"
Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
While OpenAI and Anthropic have not provided any useful information for a long time, there still are some research publications from a few US companies, e.g. NVIDIA about its Nemotron models, or Google and IBM about their small LLMs.
In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
> 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...
Same? Multitude of magnitues worse. The amount of data and type that is given here is from different level. ISPs have mostly seen it in encrypted format.
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.
The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves
> Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.
This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).
Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.
The two most significant factors at the physical level are
1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.
2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.
AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.
This is really splitting hairs; the comment you replied to didn't even mention physical space. Yes, a lot of companies could physically run their cables next to each other, but at some point the roads have to actually work, and not be demolished every time a firm enters or leaves the market.
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.
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.
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'
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
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!"
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".
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.
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.
It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5
They don't care if anyone is using a fake ID, they care that they can send the hot potato back to the American government. That gives them a legitimate "not my fault if people can make fake ids. In fact it's your fault"
Thank you. This is an expansion of surveillance. Most concerning to me is how few people understand government's access to this data. People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Indeed - Persona is backed by Founders Fund - also linked to lovely companies like Palantir, Flock & Anduril. Some people still (claim they) can’t see the massive dragnet swirling around all of society right now.
The funny thing. I've talked to normies about this. Frequently their response is "good to solves <bad thing>" But they never seem to wrap their head arround this is a tax on non-violators. Using identity verification to stop underage people from seeing porn is never realized that people that are above 18 are put at risk over this, or how it could be extended to now "adult"/"community decided 'obscene' materials" (that's what adult content is) is now restricted. (Which can include medical abortion information, disucssions arround gender, political campaigns that are unpopular, etc)
It’s especially frustrating with Anthropic because we’ve known about issues with Persona for a while now, with discord. But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy. Just go with the vendor whose name you know.
Anthropic could have EASILY made an in-house solution with < 100 employees. But no, they have to make the same mistakes that behemoths like IBM and Oracle make. Y’all haven’t even IPO’d yet and we’re already entering the “sleepwalk to your grave” phase of the corporate cycle.
In-house would almost certainly mean future prosecution by the US. Using a company connected to Palantir means any employee of the US government that wants to keep their job won't ask questions.
America passes many laws but doesn't enforce the majority of them and allows people to grow largely unencumbered unless their initiatives threaten established players or the system itself.
The Dissident: If you are vocal about the system, you get locked out at every opportunity from the things you depend on to sustain yourself and communicate (social media, housing and banking).
Red Ocean: If you try to compete in a red ocean and don't give a cut to the players in that space you're shut down with frivolous lawsuits for example by buried by frivolous patent or copyright claims, liability lawsuits, and licensure requirements.
Blue Ocean: If you are a compliant person and grow in a blue ocean, once you are big enough to where you can't realistically back down, you are threatened with prison time and sanctions unless you are onboard with the government's actual agenda and its preferred partners.
Secret Societies: Above a certain point you are expected to compromise yourself with blackmail to grow even further and become a part of the brotherhood that actually runs the government agenda.
I'm just a petty conspiracy theorist, but my assumption is their use of Persona was part of "the deal" they've been encouraged to make, and what you're seeing is a company being brought to heel.
> People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Isn't the case for any US company? I'm working in an european SaaS business, and we consider that any data that goes through Azure or Google Workspace can be accessed by the US government on a whim, even if their datacenter is on our soil.
If it's your customers' data you can use E2EE. If you need to read it, it is probably cheapest to keep everything on EU infrastructure to avoid paying repeat egress costs.
You might also consider shipping software-as-software, which doesn't need cloud resources, and the data can only be searched one customer at a time.
They are literally being forced to do this by the government. The counter-ask if for them to self immolate in order to take a principled stand, as access to all their models is banned.
Or move to Europe/China/insert lovely tax haven here. They don't have to base their operations in the USA, they CHOOSE to. I will cancel my subscription because of this, and happily use DeepSeek/mimo or whatever else comes for a fraction of the cost. China won't and mostly can't do anything with my data, the US government can and certainly will.
I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
If you think the field you are working in is more dangerous and important to the future of national security than i.e. nuclear energy and nuclear bombs you should really not just shut up and act like a cold blooded capitalist.
It feels like people here are not able to separate their personal dislike of the effective altruist types from a real debate on how big the stakes of AI are.
It’s tough to separate with them because “for the greater good” and “saving people from themselves” has historically not gone over well, especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism.
There is much stronger IDV technology than this, but it isn't as consistent across the customer base. You would have a significantly more difficult time defeating something like Chexsystems with fake IDs. If the AI models are truly so scary as to require ITAR-style restrictions, then I wonder if having an adverse financial background might be a reasonable canary for preventing access. These same kinds of questions come up for obtaining security clearances.
I noticed this is normalized too, there’s a systematic discrimination just based on the fact where you were born, as if anyone controls that, and yes, you will be added on some list, get denied or further scrutiny based on that fact only.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
China is a much more collectivist culture. They’re willing to burn money and move in big strides IF it can get them (the country) to their goals. That’s why we consistently see that china is able to move much faster in new industries as opposed to the US.
There’s a lot of individual actors in china, just like the US, but as a whole they take a “country” approach.
Currently they are the ones who are publishing stuff in the open. The American discourse is to close this market.
I'm not Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.
If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.
If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.
> suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government
I would have put “negotiations” in scare quotes. Who reported the Fable jailbreak to the government? Anthropic’s biggest shareholder. Who is now sitting at the table designing the “benchmarks” that will dictate what other model builders will be allowed to deploy? Anthropic. Who is also in talks with the government about a bailout? Also Anthropic. I just can’t take any of this at face value because that’s preposterous.
Agreed, Anthropic have been lobbying in favor of government regulation for a while now, and there is no indication that they are not getting exactly what they wanted. Maybe it helps to push any liability onto the government rather than themselves, and certainly let's them try to hand wash from any bad outcomes.
I recall a Dario interview from a few years ago talking about security in terms of protecting their model weights and as I remember even back then they had hired ex. government security officials ... I would imagine they know exactly what to tell the government to make the "negotiation" go the way they want to. Unrelated to the current conversation, but one detail of that Dario interview I recall was mention that there is an assumption that in any organization over a given size trying to protect tech from foreign governments, there 100% will be spies on your staff, and you need to plan accordingly.
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?
Because governments are notoriously inept and corrupt. I think it's bound to happen eventually (though probably not ZKP), but I'm not holding my breath.
> 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 safeguards
Since 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.
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?
I wouldn’t let anyone else use it in general because it’s an asset i don’t want to lose. As it is I now have to be careful what I use it for as I don’t want to trip any flags. Eg today I was curious how some LLM benchmarks worked and I wanted to talk through how I’d develop some, running some models locally, etc. however I don’t want to be flagged as a potential competitor and have my account revoked from Fable/etc.
It’s feeling quite similar to why I distributed out from google all those years ago. I didn’t want a hugely important centralized google account to be banned and cause friction to various aspects of my life.
The ability for LLMs to more easily catalogue user behavior and intent is going to get more interesting. Weird days. Feels like anyone could become a Facebook level metadata hoarder.
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).
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.
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.
I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.
That's the reason I don't have an id.me account to check my IRS account. I just use their guest login to play my tax bill quarterly. Not sure how I will pay my taxes once they nix that.
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.
>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.
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.
A combination of GLM 5.2 for deep tasks, and Deepseek 4 pro/flash for speed. Even Deepseek 4 pro is so fast you can quickly iterate by breaking down tasks into small chunks and steering it. I prefer that over the classic "here is an entire spec, chew on it for 30 mins" thing you would do with Opus/Fable.
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.
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
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!
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.
To be clear, Wise (previously "Transfer Wise", symbol `WISE` on the LSE) is not a bank. Wise is a Money Services Business in the US; in the UK, they are an Electronic Money (e-money) Institution. When they are holding your money, they use the services of one or more actual banks.
So, I'd be careful calling Wise a "UK bank", as that gives the wrong impression.
I especially hate it when there is absolutely zero recourse! In some cases you can go to the competition and in some you have no other option because some aspects of the service is setup as a monopoly or high friction exit process.
I’m personally against any black box decision making that would disrupt someone’s life in any way.
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.
Jeez it cant remember to use uv every time it runs python (dozens of times a day) but the one time I said "at least lube it up before you shaft me" and it noted my preference in its /insights.
to play devil's advocate, having a credit card does not tell Anthropic anything about your country of citizenship, which the US is pushing them to gate keep access on.
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.
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?
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.
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’?
When a low speed of the order of one token per second is accepted, any open weights LLM can be run on an ordinary PC (with the weights read from SSDs) and the cost becomes negligible.
Such a low speed would be annoying for a chat, but I do not believe that it is "barely useful" for a coding assistant. There are plenty of tasks for which it is fine to get results some hours later or even overnight, and batching multiple tasks can complete them in about the same time as a single task.
I don't know. Even the frontier models do dumb things sometimes. Being able to iterate (and iterate quickly) is really important. If you get 1 try a day, you're probably back to it being better to just code by hand. Also, you're going to get absolutely outpaced by anyone who uses AI that goes faster.
So maybe for a hobby project this is fine, but for something you have to take to market and compete with... I think it'd be a really rough sell.
EDIT: also, just to be clear: if there was a practical path to using local AI, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I hope it gets to the point that it's better to use local than paying someone $200/mo. But right now, that $200/mo is the clear best option. I get making compromises for ideology but the compromises are too big for me right now.
This is probably the dumbest possible way to do it. Just buy tokens through open router and you could run it all month 24/7 at 100tps for practically nothing. There are tons of ways to pay for things without giving your personal information.
$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered (a year ago it would have been more expensive, one person can spend that in a month or two)
I bought my spark and the models have already improved in that time (qwen3.6, speculative decoding 2x tgen, diffusion gemma 4x tgen) and I expect this to improve. Look out another 2-3 years, local is going to be very competitive.
That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
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.
It’s a foundational problem of how the US economy is structured. As a consumer, your power and leverage will always be at a minimum. This is why a strong democracy matters so much in capitalist nations, and why the US has been struggling for the past 25 years with that.
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.
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).
I'm very curious how they are going to handle enterprise accounts with mixed nationality / geography. In particular, what about an agent that runs in the cloud and triggers on events, built by a team with mixed people.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.
Note the big cut in token prices from China.
[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202606/1363827.shtml
They clearly specify that they accept IDs from most countries. This likely means that they've reached a deal (or hope that they'll reach one) with the US government that lets them share Fable with foreigners, but only as long as they know exactly who it is being shared with.
This is off-putting to the HN demographic, but won't change anything in practice. 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.
Have you tried one of the Kimi K2 models or the latest GLM models by z.ai? The general consensus is that they're at least at par with Claude's class.
They are but from our evals for example GLM 5.2 (unquantized) performs as well as Opus but uses more tokens and takes more time.
I really wish this would change soon but they are not there yet.
If K2 or GLM 5.2 are on par with Opus 4.8 I'll eat my hat. They're good, but they're not that good. Deepseek V4 Pro has been better than Sonnet for me, but the only model that comes close to or surpasses Opus 4.8 is GPT-5.5.
> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access
That is very well put.
If you haven’t already, check out omnigent for building workflows across multiple harnesses: https://omnigent.ai/
(Disclaimer: I work for Databricks, but do not work on omnigent - though I have submitted some QOL PRs as a community member)
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
Codex-5.5 > Opus 4.8, so that's not true.
Where does 5.5 beat Opus 4.8?
Reviews for one. It's reviews are phenomenal.
Yes and no. The hot moment I tried Fable that thing gave reviews so good I was already considering automation to cut a review for every PR in the company. Its coding abilities though were not that good.
GPT 5.5 is by far the best coding model.
> 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.
That’s totally unclear. Things are changing fast. No statement from god or potus has come down about the future of LLMs and who can access what. And for what it’s worth, I’m not able to access fable and I’m a US citizen.
> That’s totally unclear.
Lol, welcome to US foreign policy. Or US trade policy. Totally unclear, and it's a feature.
Yes, lack of stability and clarity is entirely why people are steering away from the US. Yes things can change again next week, it's not a good thing.
>That’s totally unclear.
Being unclear is enough for people to steer clear of it...
Right, if we saw an open-source Mythos release today, I’d expect it to move the government’s idea of security goalposts.
That's the implied suggestion from the verification that they can prove to only share it with US citizens
My understanding was that until they can make sure it cannot be weaponized against the US, only US citizens will be allowed to use it.
(Read: the US lacks authority to ban use by citizens and doesn't want to risk their hand in court, particularly since lawyers who know anything have all left US government and what remains are complete incompetent jokes who can't even win slam-dunk cases due to repeated procedural errors. The nice thing about blocking non-citizens is they are easy to bounce out of court on standing)
Please don’t be dumb enough to take whatever they say in good faith.
As is everything coming out of the US these days.
If you have a person as president that changes his opinions faster and more often than their underwear, you're simply not reliable.
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...
Thankfully, OpenAI's check is not required if you use their models through OpenRouter!
This didn't use to be the case (OpenRouter's OpenAI access used to be bring-your-own-key), but they've reached some sort of deal with them a couple months ago, and now you can access all the GPT-5 series models on OR with no verification at all.
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.
OpenAI has notoriously terrible engineering. Look no further than the numerous Reddit threads and YouTube videos about people trying to give them money for their services and being denied. Users routinely have to try a number of credit cards, a number of web browsers, a number of devices, and a number of physical locations.
I’m not talking about sketchy prepaid cards from weird banks on a VPN in a country the United States doesn’t do business with. I’m talking about Americans getting their Chase cards rejected on their home wifi in Ithaca.
When this initially happened to me, I assumed it was a one off thing, but I was shocked to have found out that it’s been going on for at least six months, probably longer.
I changed my macos system password and haven't been able to log into the macos chatgpt app since. It cant save the auth to wherever it tries. So bad.
Anthropic is no better if the yardstick is complaints about these topics on reddit. The main thing Anthropic seems to add above and beyond OpenAI is overbilling (that also gets the talk-to-the-hand treatment).
>OpenAI has notoriously terrible engineering.
Wasn't AI supposed to solve this? /s
They dogfooded.
Turns out it wasn't dogfood.
https://stonetoss.com/comic/recycling/
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.
The cost on Deepseek is so low, it's no wonder it's the top on open router. You can even use it from other vendors like cloudflare.
GLM-5.2 has been very good
I got an email from OpenAI letting me know I won’t be a teenager anymore next week. It’s so exciting to have AI roll back my age by more than half!
I then looked at their age verification and it used that problematic company so I cancelled out.
Anthropic does not allow... "Digital or mobile IDs."
Why on earth not?
Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
> Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/
As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...
what did you do to trigger a verification process?
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.
Claude couldn't vibe code that loop.
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
If you haven’t talked to Anthropic support yet you’re in for a surprise. I’m an engineer at a company with an enterprise contract, Anthropic people in our slack and it took me a month to get a response on my support request, I just decided it wasn’t worth it and bought a second phone number rather than wait.
Or make a new account?
You risk being silenly flagged and get nerfed responses. Somehting like shadow dumbed down.
That is an inherent and unavoidable risk regardless, as things stand if you want access to frontier models you are at the mercy of their providers.
That’s quite a claim. What’s your source for this?
Fable's model card provides the following as a relevant reference
https://xcancel.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2064949876463645026
That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
It demonstrates that:
1. Anthropic certainly has the ability.
2. They’re willing to use it silently.
And this thread is about OpenAI.
> That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
> That’s totally unrelated.
i disagree, but it seems clear, from how you put it, that there's no point explaining the why
They already reversed course on that decision a couple of days later. Trivial to find a source, but Fable is also rather notably not available to the public right now, so it's not actually a relevant threat.
excuse me but, is this trivial source you're referring to the url included in the post you're responding to, or did they reverse back to the original intent of keeping refusals quiet?
So ... like reddit! :)
Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
HN also has shadowbans. If your preferences have showdead=yes, you might see some.
That's a decent moderation, shadowban is a totally different thing. AFAIK, your karma is enough to vouch that Flagged topics or comments and return that piece into a regular displaying.
Reddit is the only platform that actually tells you that you are shadowbanned, so at least they are upfront about it, but their appeal system sucks. My friend just appealed every day for just over 600 days and finally got their account un-shadowbanned.
Isn’t that definitionally impossible? If they tell you about it then it’s not a shadow ban.
I guess it depends on the definition of shadow ban.
In Reddit's case it means you can continue to post and comment, it's just that your posts and comments are no longer seen by others.
Reddit doesn't tell you you're shadowbanned. You are thinking of regular banned.
No, they have fully banned and shadowbanned. If you are shadowbanned you can login and check the appeals page but your posts and comments will no longer be visible. If you are fully banned you cannot log in.
That is called "muted". It is not a shadowban, by definition.
No they don't and if they do tell you that means you have been banned.
"It only took two years for my friend to appeal a Ban"
If you're willing to wait a couple years, I dare say a few services might have changed their minds by then, so it's too early to judge.
Most of them don't even have a reasonable appeals process at all :(
The whole point of an identity check is that they know exactly who you are. If you tell them who you are and you fail the identity check, you can’t simply create a new account because when you go through the identity check for a second time you’ll still need to tell them exactly who you are, at which point they can match the new account to the original failure.
So I’ll just automate failed verifications for everyone I want to lock out?
An empty account and an account with a year of history have very different weights in this - most people already have an account tied to their legal name, paid for with a credit card in that same legal name. Throw in some geo-location, browser fingerprinting, etc. to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name.
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am.
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
Fun fact, if you're celebrity you get a special customer support phone number at most major corporations EG Apple because "Hi I'm Taylor Swift" gets tried a lot.
or you can scan you retina using sam altmans device and get access immediately /s
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...
THe reason why its not being talked about like net neutrality is because there aren't large companies with a vested interested interest in changing the status quo
Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners.
The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.
> 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.
The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas.
That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.
The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
> The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework.
I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer:
"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1
Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
While OpenAI and Anthropic have not provided any useful information for a long time, there still are some research publications from a few US companies, e.g. NVIDIA about its Nemotron models, or Google and IBM about their small LLMs.
you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries
In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...
The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.
Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.
And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.
Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
> 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...
Same? Multitude of magnitues worse. The amount of data and type that is given here is from different level. ISPs have mostly seen it in encrypted format.
Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.
Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.
Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets.
It’s not entirely dissimilar.
One major difference is that to send network traffic, you have to go through an ISP. With AI you have the option of local open source models
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.
The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves
> Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.
This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).
Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.
The two most significant factors at the physical level are
1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.
2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.
AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.
This is really splitting hairs; the comment you replied to didn't even mention physical space. Yes, a lot of companies could physically run their cables next to each other, but at some point the roads have to actually work, and not be demolished every time a firm enters or leaves the market.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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
Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching
https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund
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 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.
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.
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.
It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5
They don't care if anyone is using a fake ID, they care that they can send the hot potato back to the American government. That gives them a legitimate "not my fault if people can make fake ids. In fact it's your fault"
Thank you. This is an expansion of surveillance. Most concerning to me is how few people understand government's access to this data. People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Indeed - Persona is backed by Founders Fund - also linked to lovely companies like Palantir, Flock & Anduril. Some people still (claim they) can’t see the massive dragnet swirling around all of society right now.
The funny thing. I've talked to normies about this. Frequently their response is "good to solves <bad thing>" But they never seem to wrap their head arround this is a tax on non-violators. Using identity verification to stop underage people from seeing porn is never realized that people that are above 18 are put at risk over this, or how it could be extended to now "adult"/"community decided 'obscene' materials" (that's what adult content is) is now restricted. (Which can include medical abortion information, disucssions arround gender, political campaigns that are unpopular, etc)
It’s especially frustrating with Anthropic because we’ve known about issues with Persona for a while now, with discord. But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy. Just go with the vendor whose name you know.
Anthropic could have EASILY made an in-house solution with < 100 employees. But no, they have to make the same mistakes that behemoths like IBM and Oracle make. Y’all haven’t even IPO’d yet and we’re already entering the “sleepwalk to your grave” phase of the corporate cycle.
In-house would almost certainly mean future prosecution by the US. Using a company connected to Palantir means any employee of the US government that wants to keep their job won't ask questions.
How America Works, 2026 Colorized:
America passes many laws but doesn't enforce the majority of them and allows people to grow largely unencumbered unless their initiatives threaten established players or the system itself.
The Dissident: If you are vocal about the system, you get locked out at every opportunity from the things you depend on to sustain yourself and communicate (social media, housing and banking).
Red Ocean: If you try to compete in a red ocean and don't give a cut to the players in that space you're shut down with frivolous lawsuits for example by buried by frivolous patent or copyright claims, liability lawsuits, and licensure requirements.
Blue Ocean: If you are a compliant person and grow in a blue ocean, once you are big enough to where you can't realistically back down, you are threatened with prison time and sanctions unless you are onboard with the government's actual agenda and its preferred partners.
Secret Societies: Above a certain point you are expected to compromise yourself with blackmail to grow even further and become a part of the brotherhood that actually runs the government agenda.
> But anthropic leadership I guess is like any company leadership - stupid, blind, and lazy
Has it ever occurred to you that this is intentional?
All those Bilderberg and WEF forums and Peter Thiel's Dialog Club are not for nothing
I'm just a petty conspiracy theorist, but my assumption is their use of Persona was part of "the deal" they've been encouraged to make, and what you're seeing is a company being brought to heel.
> People treat AI like a diary, and the government can request that data at anytime.
Isn't the case for any US company? I'm working in an european SaaS business, and we consider that any data that goes through Azure or Google Workspace can be accessed by the US government on a whim, even if their datacenter is on our soil.
If it's your customers' data you can use E2EE. If you need to read it, it is probably cheapest to keep everything on EU infrastructure to avoid paying repeat egress costs.
You might also consider shipping software-as-software, which doesn't need cloud resources, and the data can only be searched one customer at a time.
Not just the government! techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/texas-government-data-breach-allowed-hackers-to-steal-3-million-drivers-licenses-and-passports/
They also force tap access to the data
> Pointless CYA
They are literally being forced to do this by the government. The counter-ask if for them to self immolate in order to take a principled stand, as access to all their models is banned.
Or move to Europe/China/insert lovely tax haven here. They don't have to base their operations in the USA, they CHOOSE to. I will cancel my subscription because of this, and happily use DeepSeek/mimo or whatever else comes for a fraction of the cost. China won't and mostly can't do anything with my data, the US government can and certainly will.
I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
Perhaps they should stop being holier than thou wackjobs and try the “shut the fuck up and act like a business” strategy of being a business.
Seems to be working for every other AI company.
If you think the field you are working in is more dangerous and important to the future of national security than i.e. nuclear energy and nuclear bombs you should really not just shut up and act like a cold blooded capitalist.
It feels like people here are not able to separate their personal dislike of the effective altruist types from a real debate on how big the stakes of AI are.
It’s tough to separate with them because “for the greater good” and “saving people from themselves” has historically not gone over well, especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism.
Just pay the bribes already.
I agree this is entirely theatrical.
There is much stronger IDV technology than this, but it isn't as consistent across the customer base. You would have a significantly more difficult time defeating something like Chexsystems with fake IDs. If the AI models are truly so scary as to require ITAR-style restrictions, then I wonder if having an adverse financial background might be a reasonable canary for preventing access. These same kinds of questions come up for obtaining security clearances.
>disallowed because of their place of birth
I noticed this is normalized too, there’s a systematic discrimination just based on the fact where you were born, as if anyone controls that, and yes, you will be added on some list, get denied or further scrutiny based on that fact only.
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.
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.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633 - 67 days ago, 100 comments
As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.
Discord dropped them after user backlash.
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
Any sort of identity/age verification here is problematic and unacceptable.
I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.
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.
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.
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.
> making it illegal to make open weights (maybe for selected models) available for download.
So giving another win to China?
Are you assuming that China is/will allow it's own citizens unfettered access to AI ?!
China is a much more collectivist culture. They’re willing to burn money and move in big strides IF it can get them (the country) to their goals. That’s why we consistently see that china is able to move much faster in new industries as opposed to the US.
There’s a lot of individual actors in china, just like the US, but as a whole they take a “country” approach.
Currently they are the ones who are publishing stuff in the open. The American discourse is to close this market.
I'm not Chinese or American. If China exports their AI technology and the US doesn't, I know who's going to be my supplier and I'd be very happy to pay them.
If they block access to their own citizens, to be frank, I could care less.
If their Party has their own version for what happened in the Tiananmen Square, so be it. They want to do business while the US is being hostile to everybody else.
If it gives them a leg up, sure, why not?
> suspect this new Anthropic requirement is coming from their ongoing negotiations with the government
I would have put “negotiations” in scare quotes. Who reported the Fable jailbreak to the government? Anthropic’s biggest shareholder. Who is now sitting at the table designing the “benchmarks” that will dictate what other model builders will be allowed to deploy? Anthropic. Who is also in talks with the government about a bailout? Also Anthropic. I just can’t take any of this at face value because that’s preposterous.
Agreed, Anthropic have been lobbying in favor of government regulation for a while now, and there is no indication that they are not getting exactly what they wanted. Maybe it helps to push any liability onto the government rather than themselves, and certainly let's them try to hand wash from any bad outcomes.
I recall a Dario interview from a few years ago talking about security in terms of protecting their model weights and as I remember even back then they had hired ex. government security officials ... I would imagine they know exactly what to tell the government to make the "negotiation" go the way they want to. Unrelated to the current conversation, but one detail of that Dario interview I recall was mention that there is an assumption that in any organization over a given size trying to protect tech from foreign governments, there 100% will be spies on your staff, and you need to plan accordingly.
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?
Is exactly the question. Maybe this will actually make that happen.
(I believe some EU countries do have digital attestation tools?)
Because governments are notoriously inept and corrupt. I think it's bound to happen eventually (though probably not ZKP), but I'm not holding my breath.
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 LLM
5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.
this is ridiculous.
there are tons of US providers supports Chinese models. Chinese labs give them weights, they don't give back user info in return.
Oh good, uploading your ID and selfie to the much-hated Persona. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.zyphe.com/resources/blog/persona-discord-central...
> 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 safeguards
Since 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.
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?
I wouldn’t let anyone else use it in general because it’s an asset i don’t want to lose. As it is I now have to be careful what I use it for as I don’t want to trip any flags. Eg today I was curious how some LLM benchmarks worked and I wanted to talk through how I’d develop some, running some models locally, etc. however I don’t want to be flagged as a potential competitor and have my account revoked from Fable/etc.
It’s feeling quite similar to why I distributed out from google all those years ago. I didn’t want a hugely important centralized google account to be banned and cause friction to various aspects of my life.
The ability for LLMs to more easily catalogue user behavior and intent is going to get more interesting. Weird days. Feels like anyone could become a Facebook level metadata hoarder.
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).
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.
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.
I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.
Ohhh Emm Gee, the HN singularity has arrived.
chuckling in slightly mischievous British
Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?
Why assume any responsibility when you can just outsource and shrug/blame the 3rd-party when they get breached.
I have just read that OpenAI are also using Persona?
So maybe Persona has developed tools for this specific form of eligibility check?
> How are we verifying?
> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner
See 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)
Yeah, not happening. Gonna hope for the open models getting better and staying with what I've got for now.
100% the exact second I get some popup telling me to upload documents to continue is when claude pro gets decommissioned.
Same, I won't upload ID documents for obvious security reasons
That's the reason I don't have an id.me account to check my IRS account. I just use their guest login to play my tax bill quarterly. Not sure how I will pay my taxes once they nix that.
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.
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?
Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.
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.
> We are not collecting more than we need
Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?
Issuer country is not a very good proxy for nationality, I suppose.
Wouldn't this also be true of government issued ID's? There's nothing preventing a non-US national from having a drivers license...
Maybe I just don't understand the definitions?
I am working on the assumption that the ID is used to check against some database or other via some state-provided route.
Not a chance i'll be handing my id over to Persons. So what are the alternatives for AI coding these days?
A combination of GLM 5.2 for deep tasks, and Deepseek 4 pro/flash for speed. Even Deepseek 4 pro is so fast you can quickly iterate by breaking down tasks into small chunks and steering it. I prefer that over the classic "here is an entire spec, chew on it for 30 mins" thing you would do with Opus/Fable.
Just canceled my subscription. I don't want my id data end up with persona and/or the us gov.
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.
Which are you looking at?
Wouldn't want the government to have your government-issued ID.
I have no idea about Persona though.
I know that this may sound surprising, but US is not the only country in the world ;)
My assumption was more that this is about getting set up to provide access to Fable to US citizens. I could be mistaken in that regard.
There are dozens of us!
r/USdefaultism :)
This isn't reddit that doesn't work...
I would imagine this was written by someone not from the US.
In the EU and UK, data protection legislation applies to governments' handling of their subjects' data too.
Yeah that'll be a pass for me.
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
I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock
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
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.
Out of pure curiosity, which UK bank was it?
Wise, previously TransferWise.
To be clear, Wise (previously "Transfer Wise", symbol `WISE` on the LSE) is not a bank. Wise is a Money Services Business in the US; in the UK, they are an Electronic Money (e-money) Institution. When they are holding your money, they use the services of one or more actual banks.
So, I'd be careful calling Wise a "UK bank", as that gives the wrong impression.
More info about how Wise UK works: https://wise.com/help/articles/4IusAofIppsIGPcs7sEIXI/how-ou...
Bank with technofeudalists, win stupid prizes.
I love how it will always be "Wise, previously TransferWise".
I especially hate it when there is absolutely zero recourse! In some cases you can go to the competition and in some you have no other option because some aspects of the service is setup as a monopoly or high friction exit process. I’m personally against any black box decision making that would disrupt someone’s life in any way.
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.
I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?
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.
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
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.
Is there any info on what these "certain capabilities" are?
likely mythos class models at first, but i wouldn't put it past them to expand that to the cyber verification program, or similar
On the path to the rich and powerful deciding who does and does not get access to which ai models...
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.
Jeez it cant remember to use uv every time it runs python (dozens of times a day) but the one time I said "at least lube it up before you shaft me" and it noted my preference in its /insights.
I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D
They all have everyone ID's through payments already..
They don't have nationality, I guess? Just card issuer origin and payment origin.
to play devil's advocate, having a credit card does not tell Anthropic anything about your country of citizenship, which the US is pushing them to gate keep access on.
Yep.
Yes, it’s the biometrics they’re after.
This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after
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.
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?
Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.
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.
> you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone
They'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.
(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.)
> 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?
Very disappointing that they went with Persona, the company whose CEO regularly argues with people on Twitter and lies about their arguments.
Then again they are renting data centre space from SpaceX, so there's a pattern.
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
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
Let us hope this only accelerates the proliferation of local models
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’?
The high costs are necessary for high speed.
When a low speed of the order of one token per second is accepted, any open weights LLM can be run on an ordinary PC (with the weights read from SSDs) and the cost becomes negligible.
Such a low speed would be annoying for a chat, but I do not believe that it is "barely useful" for a coding assistant. There are plenty of tasks for which it is fine to get results some hours later or even overnight, and batching multiple tasks can complete them in about the same time as a single task.
I don't know. Even the frontier models do dumb things sometimes. Being able to iterate (and iterate quickly) is really important. If you get 1 try a day, you're probably back to it being better to just code by hand. Also, you're going to get absolutely outpaced by anyone who uses AI that goes faster.
So maybe for a hobby project this is fine, but for something you have to take to market and compete with... I think it'd be a really rough sell.
EDIT: also, just to be clear: if there was a practical path to using local AI, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I hope it gets to the point that it's better to use local than paying someone $200/mo. But right now, that $200/mo is the clear best option. I get making compromises for ideology but the compromises are too big for me right now.
Not "local" in the literal sense, but I set it up to serve at half quant for $23/hr and full quant for $35/hr.
You don't need to have it always on? This is a far cry from "$200/month," but I do not think it's $50k for "useful." Do you see it differently?
This is probably the dumbest possible way to do it. Just buy tokens through open router and you could run it all month 24/7 at 100tps for practically nothing. There are tons of ways to pay for things without giving your personal information.
A decent deal but Flash is quite dumb and you still have to pay for output tokens
Yes they mean open weight models offered by various providers
$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered (a year ago it would have been more expensive, one person can spend that in a month or two)
I bought my spark and the models have already improved in that time (qwen3.6, speculative decoding 2x tgen, diffusion gemma 4x tgen) and I expect this to improve. Look out another 2-3 years, local is going to be very competitive.
You can recoup the costs quicker if you resell access to your local LLM on a reselling service.
Cheaper to just buy T-bills when I saw the numbers last time
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.
That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?
No, it’s my experience from the past 6 months
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
Not really.
That's not the option most are going to take.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.
eyeroll If you truly had the courage of your convictions you would have gone all in here and told me to stop using electricity.
I haven't told you to do anything, only highlighted that you can choose how to live your life, including not using LLM's.
Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
"can't"
Still feeling chippy over there I see.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.
It will never stop amusing me that an expired ID is invalid for verification. How does that negate my identity? Particularly my age.
Isn't it because expired IDs drop out of validation databases, fundamentally?
So an expired ID is not verifiable in the same way a fake one isn't.
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.
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.
This is why they do these things - because people just "go along with it."
It’s a foundational problem of how the US economy is structured. As a consumer, your power and leverage will always be at a minimum. This is why a strong democracy matters so much in capitalist nations, and why the US has been struggling for the past 25 years with that.
ffs do it and give me fable.
Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.
> How your data is protected
It's not
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.
No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.
Never been a better time to use local models.
So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.
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).
Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id
Where are these "certain capabilities" documentes?
https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...
"These updates apply only to consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans)."
I'm very curious how they are going to handle enterprise accounts with mixed nationality / geography. In particular, what about an agent that runs in the cloud and triggers on events, built by a team with mixed people.
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.
YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.
One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".
Fuck.. How did y'all in the Land of the Free let it get this way
by continuing down the road they have been going on for ages now
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!
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.
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!)
How does a company verify its age?
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.
It does at the end of the article, under 18 will be banned
This particular IDV flow will be used with consumer Claude web accounts only.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003
How does a dark lord born before the beginning of time verify its age?