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.
> 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.
This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.
What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?
How ironic it is that multibillion AI companies are complaining that their models are being distilled (read: used without permission) while the current top players trained their models on stolen data...
1. Identity verification as a way to validate real-personness and mitigate distillation by e.g. North Korea
2. Identity veriiication as a way to limit model usage to US residents / citizens
3. The level of model which will be subject to identity verification, today and as time goes on
It’s a mistake to conflate the three and form a rock solid opinion of exactly what will happen from here to the heat death of the universe. Everything about AI is moving quickly. I doubt Dario would claim to have a perfect roadmap not subject to change.
My personal guess is that just like export controls on CPUs, this will apply differently to different regions, and will change over time. Especially with US political instability and increasing anti-science policy, I cannot imagine Dario or anyone else would want to surrender the EU and other markets to become a US-only company.
But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing I’m not is certain. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in the current situation.
I do not want to give my private data to any company, yet alone those hostiles US companies that obey the orange king. Insanity has to be contained, not allowed to spread outside of the USA. So, no to age sniffing.
The UK is also suspect here. I don't understand why they are even worse than the USA here. Someone needs to fix the UK legislation - it is by far the worst. On audits they regularly detain people and pat them down. See Auditing Britain or DJ Audits; the US Audits on the other hand almost never reach that level of escalation. Something is fundamentally flawed in the UK.
I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models. This effectively kills my usage of anthropic for anything beyond their 4.8 models.
> I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models.
I can't speak to your specific use of Anthropic's models, but I find it interesting that people will identify themselves (to set up and pay for an account) and provide all sorts of personal (and often sensitive if not confidential) information to these models on a daily basis, but balk at a 5-minute identity verification.
It’s not the five minutes that I balk at, it’s entrusting a third party with all they need to steal my identity. But of course, they’ll never get hacked…
It's not like Anthropic is the only company in the world that would have the basic details contained on a driver's license or passport. Odds are all of the PII required for someone to steal your identity is already in criminal hands.
The National Public Data breach alone exposed the social security numbers of potentially upwards of 100 million Americans. Numerous companies have literally "all" of your personal data and you never did business with them/gave it to them directly.
It's not right but the identity theft cat is out of the bag, which is why precautions like credit freezes, are recommended for all Americans.
Where possible, I believe it's our duty to educate those who know or care little about how their devices work. Unfortunately stats aren't persuasive for my family, but they might be for some as a starting point.
These links claim that identities are stolen, but do not explain how.
What happens to the victims, who are now presumably left unidentifiable? How are they tracked if they can’t be identified? Do their families recognise them? How does that work if they were married, had children or something? Does the identity thief just take over their whole life?
As far as I know, “identity theft” is a boogeyman invented by the banks. Traditionally, when someone would go to a bank and get a loan by pretending to be another person, we just called it “fraud”.
The banks realised that it would be nice to get you to feel some responsibility when they get defrauded, so after a bunch of focus grouping they came up with this new term to imply that you are somehow also a victim when the bank gets defrauded by someone else.
I would maybe reframe it as fraud being a natural downstream effect of identity theft. I don't need to steal anyone's identity to forge a check but that's also categorized as fraud.
Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term.
If a contractor takes my money to install a pool and then disappears, I don't need to reset my entire financial identity. I think it's worth having a separate idea to describe the situation as a whole and not just the specific vector in which a crime might have been committed.
> Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term
Okay, but in the US (for example) you simply can’t do that, and your details are already available to everyone for a dollar or two.
I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.
> I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.
Stealing someone's private key still wouldn't be "identity theft", they'd just need to bootstrap a new key the same way they got the government to trust the previous one (and revoke the old one).
It's just victim-blaming and PR attempting to make companies not liable for their bad decisions.
It is because you think the contention is about being identifiable, while that is hardly the case.
Most people understand or at least accept that in order to facilitate payments and a company to follow various laws that are generally understood as "good for all" (like AML and tax avoidance), but require ID to access is not the same.
It is identical to accepting to paying for National Parks car pass or camp ground fees but protesting access fees. Not the same thing.
It is just the standard performative outrage over and over.
The same person will be uploading their ID a few days after it is introduced.
So many people have internalized an anonymous audience that they are performing to in terms of what they think the anonymous audience wants to hear that they can't tell what is their own actual thoughts and motivations.
That is why the motivation changes two weeks later and the ID gets uploaded.
Some of us hold grudges on account of performative outrage. Ubisoft made invasive DRM the norm in gaming ~20 years ago. While other companies now do the same thing, I'm still boycotting. Fuck'em.
+1. You are not alone and please keep boycotting them. I personally do this and never use any websites or services requiring "ID check". If Gov agency wants my face and prints - Ok, I will give them on the border crossing and immigration services to get a passport. Everyone else goes to hell.
I'd say before Ubisoft, Valve was the one to really spearhead DRM by introducing online verification to play Half-Life 2. Before HL2, it was almost unthinkable for a game to require Internet access to be played and most copy protection relied on serial numbers and/or presence of the original game CD. HL2 was high profile enough to make people accept the restriction.
Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes? They could have directed Claude to disconnect all non-citizens when the order came, for example. Perhaps they don't to frighten people with that ability. But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
> Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes?
> But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.
The identity verification they're doing is for legal purposes. Even if they have a way to take your name and IP address and figure out who you are with near-absolute certainty (including through the use of third-party databases), they're doing this so they have a legally-defensible process by which identities were established.
The USA is becoming a Banana Repulic. Having grown up in one, you end up learning that "the law" is never meant to be used for the benefit of the people but only to give the veneer of legitimacy for the authoritarian abuse by those in power.
Differential application of the law has been a part of American society for a very long time. I suppose you could argue that it's more brazen and accepted (or even celebrated in some cases) these days, but that could also be a function of people just being more willing to see it because America's reputation/standing in the world is in decline.
Right, but do you agree then this explains why people are not willing to give their identity details to a company, even if the company is able to deduct/obtain these details through other means if it wanted?
No. I really don't see the connection in this instance.
Many companies are required by law to verify the identities of their customers (for money laundering, sanctions compliance, etc.) and to do so in a certain way they can document.
Thinking that the US is a Banana Republic in which laws are applied differentially doesn't inherently mean that every rule that requires you to go through a process you don't like is unfair/unjust.
And? Yes, people have good reason to not trust institutions these days. But does not trusting institutions mean that you no longer have to comply with the rules, or that every rule is not based on a legitimate concern?
> This particular rule is not based on a legitimate concern.
Well, there are multiple legitimate reasons for Anthropic to ask some customers to do identity verification:
1. To comply with export controls.
2. To prevent abuse.
3. To process requests for increased usage or spend limits.
4. To defend against payment fraud.
This really isn't uncommon. I've been asked to do identity verification for something as innocuous as registering a domain name, setting up an account to bid on collectibles, etc.
If you've ever worked in ecommerce, payments or a related sector, you know how many bad actors are trying to game systems every single day and what the consequences are to the business if they succeed. Even when you're not dealing with non-negotiable compliance requirements (like KYC, export controls, etc.), there are lots of situations in which you'd have a reasonable need to establish that the people you're serving are who they say they are.
Yeah, we can come up with all sorts of reasons to justify their new policy, but at the end of the day it's clear that this policy only came after Fable got blocked. You keep trying to find a way to rationalize their action, when it is clear that the adopted this policy for one simple reason: it's an attempt to appease the US government.
Why is that? Why is so hard for you to see that Anthropic by pushing the "our models are so good that regular people should not have access to it" narrative, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot?
> You keep trying to find a way to rationalize their action, when it is clear that the adopted this policy for one simple reason: it's an attempt to appease the US government.
Your position seems to be based on lack of knowledge of the fact that the US government has broad authority to regulate AI services under existing national security and export control powers.
You can argue that those powers are wrong, but these powers are well-established and perfectly legal.
Anthropic could challenge these in court but, from what I've read, most attorneys specializing in this area of law believe it would face an uphill battle in courts because the related powers are so broad and well-established.
> seems to be based on lack of knowledge of the fact that the US government has broad authority to regulate AI services
I understand they have the authority. The point that you keep evading to answer is "Why Anthropic only? Why now?".
More than that: why do you keep arguing that people should just accept it? Why do you think that we should just roll over and accept these rules?
I am not asking you "what the courts would say", I am asking you personally: you really don't see a problem in normalizing a world where people can only conduct business if they subject themselves to give away personal data? Do you think that Surveillance Capitalism is just something that people need to accept as some natural state of affairs?
> I am not asking you "what the courts would say", I am asking you personally: you really don't see a problem in normalizing a world where people can only conduct business if they subject themselves to give away personal data?
Companies like Meta and Google collude with media/publishers/online service providers to track you across the web and use your data to target you for advertising even when you aren't registered or logged into their services. Data brokers whose names nobody knows gather and sell information about every single American. Credit bureaus track some of your most sensitive financial data whether you like or not, and sell it to companies who use it to make some of the most important decisions that affect you financially.
Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business with Anthropic for ID so that they can comply with sanctions laws is not the same thing.
This is some weird whataboutism, and it doesn't answer my question.
> Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business
Anthropic is changing the terms. It used to be until last week that ID is not required. Now it is. Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway". This is the part I am struggling to understand.
We can disagree, but please don't misrepresent the facts: new customers are not being required to verify their ID by default, nor are existing customers being contacted en masse to do so. ID verification is being used with some customers and it appears this is primarily related to account suspensions that are typically due to usage patterns, fraud concerns, etc.
> Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway".
I'm not saying anything of the sort. What I am saying is that I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
Even though Anthropic says that its ID verification is not related to Mythos/Fable, in our discussion, I have pointed out that as a US company, Anthropic could be required to comply with various export controls that are implemented under well-established and perfectly-legal export control regulations.
It is also perfectly normal for companies to require ID verification for some customers under certain circumstances to address legitimate usage and fraud concerns.
> new customers are not being required to verify their ID by default
If they want to use Mythos, they need to provide the ID. It has become a two-class service.
> I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
> If they want to use Mythos, they need to provide the ID. It has become a two-class service.
You have no inherent, God-given legal right to access Mythos. Once again, the US government (and in particular the executive branch) has a broad and well-established legal authority to regulate advanced technologies under national security and export control regulations.
If you want to buy, say, the most advanced NVIDIA chips, you can be subject to verifications as well because these are subject to export controls.
> The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
Anthropic is a private company. It is allowed to decide how to provision its service, and make changes to its service. This has absolutely nothing to do with "Surveillance Capitalism".
You have the right to vote with your wallet, which you have done. If enough people make the same decision, Anthropic will likely have to reconsider its decisions. That's capitalism, is it not?
These are a lot of rationalizations for you to justify the actions of a company whose CEO talks a lot about ethics, but when push comes to shove acts like any other corporate drone.
Also, you are talking a lot about what Anthropic can do but completely evading to actually say what you think they should do. It tells me that you know how reprehensible their ethics are, but for some reason you refuse to reject them.
We've had an interesting back-and-forth about identity verification but it seems that you don't really care about that issue.
It seems that you just don't like the way Anthropic is run, and a focal point of that is that you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
To be clear: the US government issued an order that required Anthropic to suspend access to Fable and Mythos by any foreign national. The company had to comply or it could face significant penalties. According to the company, the only way it could comply with the government order was to suspend access to everyone.
The ID verification page being discussed here has been around since before this order was issued. Like many companies, Anthropic may ask some customers for ID verification, primarily to prevent fraud and abuse. ID verification is not required to sign up, and existing customers are not all being asked to perform it.
Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged, but not making the latest and greatest models available to everyone who wants them and complying with legal government orders are not the strongest arguments about their ethical shortcomings.
> it seems that you don't really care about that issue.
Not in the particular. What I care about is the concentration of power and having to live in a world where a handful of corporations fully dictate how everyone should work.
> you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
Not at all. I don't personally care. You can find me on record saying that I'd rather work with local models that are "dumber" but can simply assist me through a process, instead of outsourcing all my thinking to a huge LLM.
> Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged
But you are still sticking by them, aren't you? Why?
> You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.
I don't recall Anthropic's payment systems, but I use Paypal wherever supported. I don't think Paypal sends my address, but am not sure. I'm pretty sure they don't send the CC information.
And often, not even the name (e.g. have often had people use my CC to buy stuff (with my permission)).
Also, I still routinely buy stuff from one service that thinks I'm in a state I haven't lived in for over 20 years, because that's the address I provided back then.
So no, generally, sending your payment info doesn't equate to sending them my address.
> These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.
There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.
Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.
But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.
Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.
You're acting like you can't just switch which llm you are using in around an hour.
I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.
Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.
This decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.
Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're perpetually at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.
Anyone doing product integrations should recognize it’s a perpetual risk but why stick to the platform that will require US citizenship demands for future models especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?
Anthropic didn’t have to beg for the government to deem their models a security crisis.
> ...especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?
This access restriction could be
1) A legitimate concern about capabilities.
2) A hype-generation scheme entered into by both the Federal Government and Anthropic.
3) Pettiness.
If we're in situation #1 or #3, then there are no other LLM providers that provide comparable services that are safe from this.
If we're in situation #2... well, I guess how safe you are from this is a factor of how desperately the company needs "wau, look how scary our software is!1!1" hype.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
I'm pretty sure that a US government export restriction / ban / etc. would count as a force majeure invalidating all the fancy wording you could wish for on a piece of paper.
The only way to actually control is to self manage in an environment you control.
The long term goal of LLMs is to automate most white collar work, so wasn’t that a risk you faced anyway? Like Amazon basics, which took all the easy to replicate goods they saw on their marketplace.
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past.
But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.
In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?
There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.
They will obviously come back from that no questions about it. It’s like an abusive relationship that CA/EU can’t fully eject from, there will always be hope of conciliation because the benefits both ways are so massive and the relationships are so entrenched, it will take much more than DJT and Republicans/dark enlightenment technocrats to completely fracture these alliances.
What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.
So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.
You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.
> You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
Trump threatened. Those were unserious remarks by an unserious person who's 80 years old. If that was all it takes to permanently demolish those alliances, they were never actually there.
No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.
And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
> No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.
Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
> And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
This completely ignores the very real, very serious damage he's doing right now, and the doors he's opening for future leaders. Discounting the dumb things he says is very dangerous. His words could lead to oh, I don't know - an insurrection?
it takes time to build up an army, we are not a unified Europe. I think both are happening at the moment - We are building our military, we are taking over "supporting" Ukraine as Trump is stepping away from that. And im sure there is some hope that the US will go back to the way it was.
Imagine you outsourced your entire company to a third party company and only have a few managers around. Then, you need to move all that support from the 3rd parties back in-house. Its not a task that is easy to do, and if we also take into account the required factories etc that need to be built to support, that takes even more time.
Its something that is happening, we are building new trade agreements with countries around the world, excluding the US. We are working on our own defense packs, and eventually if the US decides to leave NATO, or we form our own alliance, then that will happen.
And Trump was elected with the support and influence of the very cadre of oligarchs running much of silicon valley: Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, etc., etc.
Elon Musk (not Trump) is actively still weaponizing algorithmic control of X to try to destabilize US "allies". Larry Ellison is doing the same thing with a whole swathe of media companies and TikTok.
The issue is the authoritarianism and patriarchal narcissism of an American-centered global elite who have gotten so used to "winning" they began to think it was God-given right and not something they'd achieved because their winning had (broadly speaking) been in everyone else's interest.
Now that their mindset has shifted to win at all (read: everyone one else's) cost(s) - do you REALLY think that everyone is going to blindly keep following? For how long?
> Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
> Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter. And European countries are increasing military spending, by and large buying, in that order, domestic, European, major NATO aligned suppliers (most notably South Korea), and the US only when there is no choice (so F-35 and munitions/replacements for existing systems). And of course this ignores that current European military capabilities are plenty for European strategic autonomy.
> Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come. The American political system is broken beyond repair, and even the opposition to the current wannabe fascist regime are not campaigning to change anything about it. This means that regardless of who's in power next, even if they're the best thing since sliced bread, there is no guarantee the following elections won't bring another bout of wannabe fascists threatening to invade their allies.
There is no going back from that without major political reform in the US and years to earn back trust. AKA not happening. Even the opposition, even the most radical opposition, venerate American political institutions as the works of deities that can only be slightly changed, not replaced wholesale. And, from the outside, the whole system - how elections are done (you need proportional representation, term limits, no janky districts), representative structures (flat two seat per state senate doesn't work anymore, house of representatives having skewed and fixed numbers doesn't either), judicial system (political appointments and elections, and for life appointments, do not work), supreme court (political appointments and for life appointments do not work), etc are overdue by decades for serious structural reforms.
>> Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
> And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on.
> What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter.
So what? You're claiming the alliance is irreparably broken, who cares about the text of a treaty?
Just do it, put your money where your mouth is.
> I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come.
I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
> So what? You're claiming the alliance is irreparably broken, who cares about the text of a treaty
The alliance is broken, yes, and everyone is treating it as much. Kicking the US out, other than being impossible, will only piss off the petulant children.
> Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on
He was damn close to attacking Greenland, so much so that various European nations felt the need to send soldiers there to show they're commited to defending it. It doesn't matter that he didn't actually do the absurd.
> I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Geopolitical priorities and alignments take years to shift. So does military procurement. Once the US is no longer reliable, it will take years of reliability before there is a chance to mend the relationship.
> Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
I'm sorry, but that is just pure grade A American bullshit. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence to spout such nonsense. Various European countries spend to various extents. Nobody, is getting protection for "free". They're all pitching in to different levels (some like Poland, France, UK, definitely more than others). And the US was getting plenty in exchange, most notably bases to run their famous and intimidating logistics. The US definitely loses more out of losing those than European nations that have the British and French nuclear umbrellas if it push came to shove.
That’s like claiming Iran didn’t ever threaten North Korea, USA etc but only their leaders. Trump is the guy Americans had choosen to decide their foreign policy. Just like Russians can’t claim they are innocent just because of what their leaders do Americans have even less excuse.
US controls on cryptography software lasted _20 years_. If there's something I'm absolutely certain of, and I'm certain of very little in the fields of AI and of politics, it's that Fable will be utterly irrelevant in 20 years time.
So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"
Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.
You should look up the words "crypto wars". There were absolutely very annoying attempts by the US government to limit encryption, forcing every software maker to maintain two editions of their software: one targeting the domestic audience with no restrictions, and one "international edition" which had to intentionally weakened encryption (as in ship with shorter key lengths).
I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.
And a fraction of the US market at that. Requiring ID scans and all of this nonsense to use a chatbot just added a whole layer of friction that many are going to just nope on out of and use one of the endless other services. I suppose the next step will be for the government to try to ban those other services once they mature and start booming.
shhh, the investors might hear you. If they do then the bubble pops, all those data centre projects grind to a halt, 5% of US GDP disappears, and the USA goes into a deep recession.
Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.
After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
> and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.
They don't need to. They can undermine the West economically and politically.
The US has been a much more violent imperial power but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
You don't know what you're talking about. Russians occupied my country, killed almost no one, and yet it was far worse than all the economic damage caused by Western neoliberalism.
US imperialism has been a blight to the world, outright killing millions. Modern China did nothing on that scale.
> ...but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
"What IT has done overseas" refers to the US.
But as for China, the Great Leap Forward is considered the largest man-made famine in history, causing somewhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of irreplicable artifacts and historical sites.
Like the US, China has been involved in sowing discord and destruction in other countries. What the US did in Cambodia was an absolute travesty. But China was Pol Pot's primary backer, having provided around $1 billion in economic and military aid to the Khmer Rouge. So it's not like China was an idle witness to what happened in Indochina last century.
We can argue all day about the greater and lesser of two evils but my point remains: powerful countries can cause significant harm to the world without invading other countries.
You do realize that your quoted figure of 15 and 55 million deaths, came from looking at population figures and assuming that everybody Pre great famine would have the exact same number of children and those children will have the exact same number of children as the starting point.
And is just pure nonsense, might as well claim that the US killed 548 million people, because in 1957 the US population was 172 million and had a TFR of 3.62 , assuming that trend held we would be at 720 million in 2026
Yes, I did interpret "it" as referring to China, not US, in that sense I misread it.
I agree that Great Famine was horrible.
My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs (and actually dead people) any day. (Which was kind of the point of EHS, even in it's most neoliberal incarnation.)
Here's my prediction: Trump eventually crumbles, but is replaced by an equally (but differently) inept establishment Democrat figure. Conversations about inequality and wealth taxation in the West continue to be (increasingly) suppressed. Backlash against both inequality and related anticapitalist speech suppression continues to grow. Capital interests continue to use redirection (culture wars, race wars, religious wars, etc.) as a diversionary tactic. China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace. America's silicon and software advantage quickly evaporates. Economic advantage follows soon after (already in progress due to USD debt crisis and associated inflation). Africa and Latin America continue to shift towards China or neutrality. South Asia follows a bit later. North America and Europe remain indecisive and overreliant on America, American tech, and USD financial markets. Taiwan becomes increasingly pro-China/pro-unification as South Asia reorients towards Chinese hegemony while Western hegemony continues to crumble in on itself due to its inability to reign in overcompetition (capture) which stifles innovation and deteriorating material conditions sew ever increasing conflict and fragmentation.
Tl;dr: The West competes itself into irrelevance while China cooperates its way to victory.
Whether or not the information war turns into a kinetic war depends largely on the West's ability to recognize that coercion, deception, and manipulation in the pursuit of dominance is not really an effective strategy in an information war.
On that front I think you’re badly mistaken. China’s government publicly states that it doesn’t see our idea of society and government as a good idea. They are a rivalling system, with very different values.
The US is many things, but it’s still way more aligned with European, Canadian, Australian etc goals than China ever will be.
I just got finished setting up an environment with MiMo-Pro-2.5-UltraSpeed, Qwen-3.7-Max (basically used this to sub in for Opus), and of course DeepSeek.
Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even better.
You need to look up loss leader strategy and dumping in international trade because that is what china is doing. And your use of their models over api is giving them training data.
They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.
But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.
The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.
Most the Chinese models are open source. You can buy some hardware and go run them yourself, if you really are concerned about "dumping" and "loss leaders".
But you do see that supports my argument right? For every one of
Us that stops paying monthly subscription or api costs to OpenAI/anthropic/google the smaller their market gets. Taken to enough scale and they won’t reach profitability.
So while I am running local models I am aware of the geopolitical implications
I don't know what your argument is. Maybe some US companies won't be financially viable - so what? I mean if it affects you, you have stake in those companies, fair enough. But it's not a geopolitical problem - most US citizens even (not to mention the rest of the world) will be better off if they have access to public models.
I made the same switch. Impressed with the sheer value of Deepseek v4 Pro and Minimax M3 so far. I mostly work on an open source academic simulation tool, so I’m happy to be a source of training data.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
> 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.
Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.
> banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free
It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.
Fair point. The fact that even americans got cut off from Fable is definitely ironic though. I suppose that's going to be fixed now that they're implementing identity verification. And even that runs smack into the concept of freedom since freedom under surveillance isn't real.
But given the hoopla about how a driver’s license isn’t valid in the SAVE act because it doesn’t prove you’re a US citizen, how is drivers license verification going to satisfy the US national requirement here?
Many states have extra markings on the card for citizens vs legal residents. A valid birth certificate would also be enough since the US is one of the only nations to recognize birthright citizenship.
Also worth pointing out that most Americans don't have passports and getting one can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.
Also, you'd have to be smoking something to assume that the three letter agencies are not going to be combing through Anthropic's customer list and assessing for fraud and foreign bad-actors. If you lie, they'll probably catch you eventually and most people are not stupid enough to lie about their identity to the US government and think they'll get away with it forever.
It doesn't even refer to all Americans. Just the wealthy ones. And even that is increasingly reduced to just the wealthy ones who support Donald Trump.
Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.
The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.
However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.
I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.
Yeah I know about tweakcc, even had some custom prompts committed to my dotfiles repository for a while. For some reason it wasn't working for me, don't remember why.
I just kept using it to fix the prompts for a long time. Eventually I asked Claude to port it to Python to make it easier to maintain. Now every month or so Claude dissects the Claude Code binary and integrates the script with the newest version.
Thanks for the info. Yeah tweakcc is finicky, in fact it broke again for me with the latest CC update. Maybe I'll end up with my own solution as well in the end.
Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.
Yeah for a side project I just switched over to DS4 and between Pro and Flash a few days ago I've spent $1.96 both for code work and some large LLM text processing tasks.
It feels to me as good as the last version of Opus I was using (I think 4.6 or 7?). I'm going direct through the DeepSeek API, not Openrouter.
33 cents? That's insane... I set up an API cost meter on my Claude Code status line and it frequently runs into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
Maybe I'll try out a month on the usage plan and see how it compares dollar for dollar. I think I'm squeezing about as much as I can out of Anthropic under the plan
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.
The Peter Thiel connection is especially toxic for a lot of people outside the US. Whether it's substantive or just optics doesn't make a huge difference.
> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on
Why? Is Claude really so much better that the additional hassle and privacy invasion is worth it? What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?
Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't everyone already be using OpenRouter & friends to avoid getting screwed over by the model-of-the-week - making a switch absolutely trivial?
Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.
That remains to be seen. Assuming the worst from the start discourages people from taking any action and is an imprudent way to approach political topics.
Completely disagree that 99% of people will just do it.
A lot of people are already skeptical of the frontier labs - I moved over to Claude from OpenAI when they bent over for the US government. And I'll certainly move on again if Claude start asking for photo ID.
> Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate
I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have.
This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.
The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.
This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.
Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.
The worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner.
Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company?
There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.
> 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.
Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.
I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.
It doesn't matter, because people are adopting AI now, and even if the restrictions are lifted tomorrow, it has been proven that relying on an American SaaS is risky, because you can just lose access.
So why would you get that instead of self-hosting Mistral Studio and fine tuning for your needs? Or going fully DIY with e.g. OpenShift AI and open source Chinese models?
That way you fully control availability, costs and quality.
Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.
Even if it's never lifted, probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.
Open models will catch up to Opus 4.8 and state of the art will, most likely, continue to get better. It won't be long before "better than Opus 4.8" is not a big deal.
> probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.
If you buy the story that Anthropic's marketing hype drove US regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The best case real reason is Anthropic pissed off the administration.
Which will leave OpenAI, Google, Meta, and X far more vulnerable to government data sharing requests... and KYC identity is incredibly valuable to mandate for those.
That is my best guess too, which is an even better case for better-than-Opus-4.8 models being available from OpenAI without drawing the attention of the administration.
I do think their marketing hype was a factor though even in this narrative. Andrew Jassy tells a vengeful admin that there's this jailbreak for a model Anthropic said was dangerous, and vengeful admin seizes the opportunity to take vengeance.
My belief that OpenAI will release a model better than Opus 4.8 globally should not be interpreted as a claim that they will avoid a shakedown. I think if they encounter corruption, they will engage with it.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.
I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
not if they run out of investments to train their cutting edge models. Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are going to be a massive flop if they aren't able to sell their best models to the world.
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.
GLM 5.2 is far better than deepseek V4. Seriously feels like I’m talking to a Claude model. Also burns tokens like one, so there is that. Deepseek is unbeatable on price/quality.
Honestly just give it time. This stuff moves so fast next month the conversation will be different. For folks who don’t like the ID privacy issues, use Deepseek et al and it should be able to get the job done even if the experience takes a bit more wrangling.
The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.
Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to continue training models indefinitely.
Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference.
Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions if its going to get blocked?
Of course this can't go on forever. Especially not on LLMs. But are we really close to the limits of what these LLMs can do? I'm not sure we are.
The difference between GPT-5/Opus 4 and GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8 is striking. For software development anyway, there's no comparison. And all this has happened in a year.
My assumption is there will be another 2-3 years of improvements ahead of us on LLMs alone. Through hardware upgrades, larger training runs, better data quality, better algorithms, etc.
Of course, by then these models will be quite expensive. Will my company pay for it? I don't know. I'm sure some people will though.
Using even double the total tokens and taking, what, 2-3x the time?, still seems worth it if prices are 5x+ cheaper (which OpenRouter [1] claims is the case).
On NeuralWatt for my personal projects at home (not affiliated, just a happy customer), I get so much more mileage out of GLM than I get out of Claude at work, specifically because it's priced as a hammer I can pound any nail-shaped-object with, not a delicacy I need to carefully budget-analyze to try to figure out if it's worth burning my monthly spend limits on this task.
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.
It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.
If they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.
You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.
Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...
> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models
May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)
I’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.
There’s no way I’m giving a random foreign company my ID.
I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done.
I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market
The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.
How does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.
> America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge.
this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion.
just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people.
the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper.
if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?
I don't believe US government wanted to restrict the model use to US citizens only. The bad actors will and can find their ways around it.
They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model.
Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.
This strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it.
Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.
No. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
I wanted Fable in order to harden my C project against exploits and vulnerabilities. Anthropic downgraded me to Opus 4.8 every single time I tried to do it.
So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to
No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.
Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.
And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.
AI was always going to be geo-politically fragmentary. As soon as we started talking about it like a utility it was clear that every country was going to be strongly limited to the resources it could develop and the infrastructure it could build out. The US and China will still be selling hardware, managing infrastructure and licensing models and yes the domestic market is massive.
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)
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!
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).
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.
I didn't know this. Looks like I dodged a bullet - being totally blind meant the chance of issues was high but luckily it worked. It triggered the id check while trying to get computer use to work for an installer running as admin on windows. Actual reverse engineering I got it to do in the past didn't trigger it.
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.
> they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
They could have vibe-coded their own verification system that uses DC APIs. It shouldn't take long, assuming that Anthropic still has access to Fable. /s
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.
Why would they care about _you_ when they have just a bit short of a billion users and they are up for a huge IPO? Of course they won't even bother implementing a retry.
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.
It's frustrating that I can't find docs that even pretend to answer this question. Maybe it's my fault, maybe I overlooked it? I hope so.
To me, without documented use cases where you might/likely/certainly trigger identity verification, how can I properly limit my curiosity as someone who will gladly stay on the safe side for SOTA cloud model use? I'll happily stay away from these topics if I'm informed on what they are, even if the docs are vague.
Does anyone have insight into the answer to this? What API calls? What user behavior? What topics should I let go unanswered (or converse about with local LLMs) if I want to avoid losing access to the tooling?
The thought that they don't/won't publish this document should scare everyone. That leads to "because I said so" service refusal that is a very slippery slope.
I do understand that all businesses are allowed to refuse service to me in the USA, from food trucks to AWS, and that's fine with me. But at least tell me your rules and extra verification trigger criteria so I have a chance of not using your service in a way that concerns you.
They require verification to access the more capable models through their API. It's not required for "consumer" usage, which also includes things like the Codex CLI authenticated via oAuth.
It can trigger it's self, when it decides it needs to try lots of different options to get clicks into an installer running as admin. There's basically nothing you can do to prevent it.
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.
Shadowban and community-driven moderation are different poles. Former is a tool of shallow narcisses, latter is the best moderation strategy possible in the clearnet. Come on, commenter.
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
It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.
AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.
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.
I presume you get connected somehow when opening up a high-value account at a participating bank. If that account has some sort of concierge service, I presume that’s how special numbers for other companies might be distributed.
Pope Leo is not that rich, and had lived outside the US for many years (he came up in the church hierarchy of Latin America), so it’s not that surprising that he ran into this situation.
It goes something like this (it varies by country / citizenship): first you upload a picture of your ID, then you use your phone to take a video of your face, then the two are matched. A failure is when the uploaded ID doesn’t match your face.
You can’t get to the part where they don’t match without uploading a picture of their ID. If you don’t have their ID, then you can’t fail to match. If you fake the ID, then when they come to upload their own ID, their ID won’t match your fake ID and they won’t be blocked.
Control over... my government ID? I understand why someone might oppose this on systemic grounds if they don't believe that frontier models have dangerous capabilities, but I don't understand what the personal risk to me of ID verification is supposed to be. Unlike Discord, Anthropic has my credit card info, so they already know who I am.
If you are comfortable with your ID scans sitting who knows where then I guess you are their target. Real fun starts when you identity gets stolen tho.
I'm not comfortable with it, but I've already had to verify my ID in the past to people I trust substantially less to handle the images securely. I can understand why someone who's never previously generated a digital photo of their ID might be more worried.
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.
> Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers.
The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1].
Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC.
> not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet.
[1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically
> 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.
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 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
That's nonsense. You might not be able to afford to enter the market but that's not at all the same as a physical constraint capping the number of competitors.
You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies
If I want to service 1234 sesame st from my physical location with power lines there are a very limited number of routes I can take. The limited physical space quickly becomes crowded, duplicate physical infrastructure of that nature is highly inefficient, and there's a (completely pointless) negative impact on society to accommodate the constant installation and servicing.
Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".
> 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.
I'd counter the exact opposite. You can purchase GPUs on the open market, they're just expensive. You can install the GPUs anywhere in the world, it doesn't need to be a particular street or a particular house. Suitable land and infrastructure for a large factory is similarly scarce and expensive and might need to be built out at great time and expense but that doesn't make heavy industry a natural monopoly.
Sure, there's currently a supply crunch for a lot of this stuff (ex gas turbines) but temporarily bad market conditions doesn't make something a natural monopoly either.
> 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 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
I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.
You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.
The identity verification support page says 'updated this week' but that is just an update to the appeals process. https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/
"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."
The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.
An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.
Incorrect. The policy already allowed age and identity checks. You can find cases of people being flagged for ID checks across social media like Reddit, or even in this thread on Hacker News. This is not new.
At least I (living in the EU) received an email at work on the 18th that had this section under "What has changed":
2. Verification Data. As part of our efforts to ensure the security of our services, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. We have described what information we collect and how we collect it.
Thanks. I went looking for how to actually verify myself as I would love to get access to Fable again. This post confirmed it, it's not relate to Fable at all and has been around. Thanks.
The answer seems to be yes [0]. Although I think it's important to state The Web Archive link proves that the recent Fable banning was not the catalyst for the page being linked.
Will Fable be back behind an ID verification step? I wouldn't be shocked if that happened. However, this specific support page and the ID veridiction process is not new. It is currently enforce.
It appears (but I can't be certain and don't think it's in bad faith) that many people are under the assumption that this is a result of the Fable banning. As a datapoint, I did some form of KYC verification to use OpenAI's cybersecurity platform a few weeks ago.
To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.
Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.
Notably, though, Persona does not have access to your Claude interactions, other than your signup/verification date. They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.
> They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.
And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.
Maybe I’m entirely uncreative here, but if all they have is identity data and the implied data of having triggered a verification event, it feels like at best anything trained on this is really sketchy and could lead to some really messed up analysis. Like “we determined brown people trigger perform Claude queries that trigger identify verification at a rate 70% higher than white people”.
They would have access to IDs and whatever photos or real time video/audio is requires to verify. That's a big step towards building quite a large dataset for ID systems used for surveillance, for example.
There's also always the risk of not knowing who gets those documents later. The Dutch didn't think much of keeping detailed records including religious affiliation until the Nazis rolled into town.
LLM use is obviously much less politically charged today than religion was then (or ever), but that can always change, especially when an administration has already attacked said LLM provider as being something along the lines of a dangerous enemy of the state.
…and when they inevitably leak your government name with your facial biometrics? You can change your cc number and your phone number and your address. Your facial geometry, not so much.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.
In my case, the ethical AI theatre fell apart as soon as I read about their first military contracts, specifically with the US government.
Their ethos is boiled down to ”we’ll do everything to stop AI from killing us all! However, on the path to AI world domination, we don’t mind helping with killing people here and there :)”
I canceled when they first labeled as a supply chain risk. Switched to codex and neverlooked back. This company will be more evil then Google at the end.
OpenAI had the the same restrictions. Also required you to verify via Persona. I complained and at some point the restrictions were removed. Not sure if because of my complaining or if someone in our org actually verified.
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"
> It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5
This help page has been there for a long time. Long before Fable was announced.
Their ID process isn’t new.
They might use it in the future to gate access to Fable if they can conclude that it’s sufficient to comply with the regulation, but the fact that they had this process in place already and they’re not using it for the Fable situation suggests there’s more to it.
How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.
I normally run away from these ID checks. It’s just a matter of time until lone of these databases with everyone passports and videos get hacked. And vibe coding only makes it more likely.
I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
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.
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.
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)
Many of the people that talk about the “massive dragnet swirling around” are posting all their details to social media and checking in on their Ring cameras, and they’re also volunteering for the persona uploads.
> 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.
There is no way for Anthropic to move and remain competitive and useful. Their staff are (primarily) in the US. Thousands of people with mortgages, marriages, kids in school, recurring medical appointments with their trusted providers, people who speak only English. This idea that US companies could just hop jurisdictions because the state turned against them and their customers is an insane one.
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.
> especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism
This is what I don’t really get about the AI discourse… I don’t have any reason to think this is all a veneer over capitalism. We don’t know what goes on in their head but the track record of the cofounders of Anthropic is quite honest so it feels like a conspiracy theory to suggest they are purposefully getting themselves nationalized when the simplest answer is that there is real documented concern on AI safety risk
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.
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.
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.
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.
That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.
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).
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
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.
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.
Persona is also a core provider in jurisdications implementing ID laws for social media and other web services.
Considering the ties to Palantir and America's mass surveillance apparatus, one could even argue that a primary goal of the admin could be to use the USA's current AI lead to accelerate the adoption of web ID laws, and global push to deanonymize all web traffic.
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.
Don't worry, they take security and privacy very seriously and have reviewed and updated their procedures to ensure your data is only shared with trusted partners.
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.
Deepseek v4 pro or GLM 5.2 might be a good start. Bijan Bowen from youtube makes some excellent LLM reviews, I'll be watching even more intently from now on. All I really need is a model which is as good as Opus 4.5 was, so this transition should be fine. Thinking of switching too?
I'm not from the US. And given the current behaviour of said country, I don't want to hand them the capability to connect my AI chats with my identity (yes, I know that they quite probably can do that at will already - but I do not need to hand it over on a silver plate)
So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM. Maybe a political candidate for the opposing party has something embarrassing there for example.
> So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM
This should definitely be a concern for any Claude user, especially given the open corruption of the current US administration.
If that alone doesn't concern you, everyone should also remember that Anthropic has accidentally released their own source code multiple times at this point.
Why should anyone believe they are going to handle your personal data with any more care than their own?
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.
I am reminded of the time Discords support desk was compromised where hackers had access to the data of anyone who ever had to give their support channels their ID. Are we sure we trust this third party to not be compromised? Is Anthropic allowing non-US citizens access to this data? Are they in countries where they could be bribed over access to this data much like in Discords case?
I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
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.
Restricting access to US-only when the training dataset is from data of people around the world and data centers are not all US-only is something that's making me consider not supporting Anthropic.
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’?
$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.
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.
glm-5.2 is available for $20/month on ollama.com and is IMHO more functional than the $200/month claude max subscription. you can even use the same claude harness [0]. You get about 20x more token usage at 10x less the price.
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.
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
I feel like you missed the point pretty aggressively here if you're trying to claim waymo's existence in any way justifies burning roughly the GDP of Luxembourg on R&D. This should be a fairly alarming indicator of how utterly divorced the tech industry is from any kind of real world outcomes and just one of countless examples of tech industry hype resulting in embarrassingly miniscule returns when actual results are considered.
The cars exist, and they drive themselves. In the real world. Here's the latest city list:
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Metro Phoenix, AZ
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
San Antonio, TX
Nashville, TN
I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?
pinches nose in frustration Yeah and they fled the Atlanta metro area because it rained. The point (the actual point here) isn't to relitigate Waymo's arc of existence. I merely hold them up as one of countless examples of the market's apparent disinterest in examining basically any of the tech industry's claims vs reality and how this leads to deeply perverse outcomes that absolutely would not be tolerated from any other industry segment. I'm guessing I'd get less pushback if I'd instead mentioned techbros attempts to reinvent trains badly from first principles being a smoke screen to sabotage mass transit projects, or pretty much anything involving social media or computers in classrooms.
While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
I feel like comparisons with the industrial revolution are reductionist in dangerous ways. The industrial revolution first shifted and then increased overall demand for labor. This made the labor movement possible and eventually ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the working classes. AI (by it's own marketing claims) is poised to vastly reduce demand for traditional labor without creating any new demand to replace it. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the modern economy it's not hard to imagine this proposed reduction in labor demand collapsing the economy in ways that fucking with interest rates and printing money don't fix.
I'm really struggling to get a handle on your position here. You appear to be arguing the worst positions from both sides of the debate around AI at the same time. If you're claiming the future is here and it is deeply stupid then we're in violent agreement.
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.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
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.
> 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.
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.
Except its like completely useless and insane from security standpoint. Any bad actor will just pay $50 to a meth junkie to register and verify account.
Fortunatelly its all just secuiry theatre so no one cares.
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.
Anthropic is really on a tricky path here. When you have had runaway success due to a hit it is easy to believe that it is the natural way of things. However, that happened due to unique convergence of tech paradigm shift, the competitive landscape, and how they were positioned to capture that value through claude code.
They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'. While it's an admirable internal quality for the company to have, their treatment of their user base (developers, users) has been bordering on indifference and their stance bordering on arrogance.
As competition heats up, there is a very real chance of them shooting themselves in the foot with friction such as this (to be fair not completely in their control but also they had their share of responsibility that led to this)
> They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'.
...I don't think this is, like, a choice available to Anthropic. Their idea of AI safety—in the very specific "an unaligned AI could kill everyone" sense—is Anthropic's entire reason for existence. It's how they've attracted AI researchers, which in turn is probably why they have the best models right now. (I really do think they have the best models, although I can't prove it because LLM benchmarks don't work. They're certainly very good.)
I have no idea what the top executives truly believe, but regardless of whether their messaging is sincere, it's likely for their employees as much as the rest of us.
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.
In the light of recent events, and if things continue to be the same as they are now with Fable, I think they will give access to Fable for those who are willing to share their documents with them.
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
Yes, those tools are to collect a real-time selfie and photo of your government-issued ID, store it insecurely, feed it into some other 3rd-party networks to profile you, and share with their trusted partners for reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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" it noted my preference in its /insights.
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.
>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.
MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB RAM + oMLX|LM Studio|Llama.cpp|etc. + Opencode|etc. + Models from DeepSeek|Qwen|Google. There are alternatives to centralized, cloud-based LLMs!
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".
> Persona is a third party identity verification company backed by Peter Thiel. The announcement comes months after Discord dropped Persona as an age verification vendor following significant user backlash and a reported data exposure incident in February 2026.
So, in the end, it was just another mass ID grab by Persona? This also doesn't look like how EAR stuffs were handled.
Currently going through all my claude web chats and building conversation logs and downloading all my files as well as using the export function. Getting throttled pretty hard now. I have a max20 plan and will be canceling it at the end of my billing cycle. What disappointing news! I was all in until this identity verification requirement. I guess I will have to try out deepseek now.
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.
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.
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.
Why use Persona? Most countries have real services for identifying users. Same services that are used when you pay online or do your taxes. At the end it does not really matter I guess. American cloud services are compromised and can no longer be trusted.
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.
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes
I'm always curious about these stipulations. Its not like Anthropic would have a choice here what the legal demands are, but I don't see a commitment to make all requests as public as they legally can.
If the government were to say export controls mean you must share every identity verification attempt with us, it may be a long drawn out battle if Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.
How is it going to work for corporate customers. What if one us employee writes claude output into a ticket, can that be read by a non us citizen employee? What about paraphrased?
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.
> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.
As said - YOU have become their product. I call it slavery.
Anyone still wondering who really is pushing for mandatory age sniffing on computers? We are seeing the whole picture slowly now. AI is a huge scam - it is all against humans.
If models start only being available for a certain class of citizens of x,y,z countries, there will be "smart hackers" selling out their token usage for twice the price or something (a litteral black market for tokens).
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.
Tom Sawyer at one point was painting a fence and trying to get people to help him and nobody would. Until he started saying "Oh I don't know, I'm not sure if I can let you help out".
Not much pen testing you can do if they decide to cut you off. E.g on Linkedin it only works with NFC-enabled passports so it cryprographically signed by issuer country.
Though considering how many americans dont have passports its will be like shooting themself in a foot.
At the very least I would expect them to support eID for everyone who can and doesn't want their 3rd party. Also much better than take a video of plastic card.
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.
> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.
What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.
AI is all about information and therefore about speech. If you need to identify yourself to access information or ask questions, it undermines freedom. Anthropic is on the wrong side of history.
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.
Come on guys, just give your ID, passport data and photo (since it scans NFC) to Persona. After all Peter Thiel is the most trustworthy supplier of tech in US used to kill people using drones with AI including face recognition.
Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
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.
this will finally kickstart the self hosted revolution in full force. Because I for sure af ain't giving my id to some AI company and have them profile me into oblivion.
Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI.
"Hey, maybe social media shouldn't be made available to children. Let's add some age checks maybe?" "Reee noo that's invasion of privacy it's a slippery slope"
"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"
`Persona is contractually limited in how they can use your data: only to provide and support verification and to improve their ability to prevent fraud.`
Right.... So training a better facial recognition model improves their ability to prevent fraud?
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).
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!
So they will be able to know how each person thinks, block capabilities they want to block, boycott what they want to boycott, and influence perspective on reality.
Fortunately they are Anthropic and so as the name tells, they will care about humans. And so we can trust them they won't try to push agendas that require constant propaganda to be accepted, since it never happened before right?
De platforming, debanking, misinformation, hate speech, anyone?
>> We only use your verification data to confirm who you are and not for any other purposes.
We use "who you are" mainly for banning you from the system for life, so you'll never be able to AI program again and will have to leave the industry because some arbitrary decision by some grunt at Anthropic decided you were in breach of something, with no path for review or justice.
It's annoying but ok in general to verify age of your users. The problem for me is mainly how and what vendor they use. They picked the worst possibilities.
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?
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.
I mean, the easiest starting step would be: Identity Verification via the methods Discord switched to after realizing Persona was horrible.
Much more ideally, some sort of government-ran zero-proof service where Anthropic can confirm solely that you are a valid US Citizen without Anthropic gaining enough PII to link my account to a particular legal identity (these already exist)
Of course, if your adversary can't just buy a dozen US Citizens, they're not really much of a threat to begin with... (there are lots of ways to buy people: explicit bribes, people of questionable loyalty, scam them, or just hack into a dormant account with an annual subscription)
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.
I understand how this can be incredibly frustrating to non-US users or people who would like to remain anonymous. But from an enforcement perspective makes sense. If someone is able to leverage a jail break to break into a classified system, the government needs to easily be able to track down who that person is.
A. This brings responsibilities on using these super powerful models like fable and mythos.
B. Distillation attacks can be avoided as someone who does it can be perma banned
C. Brings value to having an American passport, AI benefits all the world equally but it's built on American talent and capital. There should be some value to people who are not shareholders.
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.
Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April. Wayback Machine if you don’t believe me: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...
> 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.
This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old. LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls. These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
This is a strange plea for optimism.
Sincerely or not, judgement is yours, Dario has been begging for regulation. He has been talking about how Claude models are distilled by foreign adversaries. And now the regulation is here.
What makes you think this situation that the CEO of Anthropic is asking for it temporary? Do you not believe Dario was sincere?
How ironic it is that multibillion AI companies are complaining that their models are being distilled (read: used without permission) while the current top players trained their models on stolen data...
We still have to see what will happen when people "uncopyright" Disney movies, Microsoft software, ...
There are three issues here:
1. Identity verification as a way to validate real-personness and mitigate distillation by e.g. North Korea
2. Identity veriiication as a way to limit model usage to US residents / citizens
3. The level of model which will be subject to identity verification, today and as time goes on
It’s a mistake to conflate the three and form a rock solid opinion of exactly what will happen from here to the heat death of the universe. Everything about AI is moving quickly. I doubt Dario would claim to have a perfect roadmap not subject to change.
My personal guess is that just like export controls on CPUs, this will apply differently to different regions, and will change over time. Especially with US political instability and increasing anti-science policy, I cannot imagine Dario or anyone else would want to surrender the EU and other markets to become a US-only company.
But whether I’m right or wrong, one thing I’m not is certain. I can’t imagine how anyone could be in the current situation.
Do you sincerely believe Dario wants Fable to be restricted to US citizens only?
Why else would they demand age sniffing?
I do not want to give my private data to any company, yet alone those hostiles US companies that obey the orange king. Insanity has to be contained, not allowed to spread outside of the USA. So, no to age sniffing.
The UK is also suspect here. I don't understand why they are even worse than the USA here. Someone needs to fix the UK legislation - it is by far the worst. On audits they regularly detain people and pat them down. See Auditing Britain or DJ Audits; the US Audits on the other hand almost never reach that level of escalation. Something is fundamentally flawed in the UK.
The UK has been worse than the US on privacy and basically any privacy-adjacent right for like 50 years, if not longer.
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I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models. This effectively kills my usage of anthropic for anything beyond their 4.8 models.
> I’m a US citizen and absolutely will not be uploading additional information just to use a company’s models.
I can't speak to your specific use of Anthropic's models, but I find it interesting that people will identify themselves (to set up and pay for an account) and provide all sorts of personal (and often sensitive if not confidential) information to these models on a daily basis, but balk at a 5-minute identity verification.
It’s not the five minutes that I balk at, it’s entrusting a third party with all they need to steal my identity. But of course, they’ll never get hacked…
It's not like Anthropic is the only company in the world that would have the basic details contained on a driver's license or passport. Odds are all of the PII required for someone to steal your identity is already in criminal hands.
The National Public Data breach alone exposed the social security numbers of potentially upwards of 100 million Americans. Numerous companies have literally "all" of your personal data and you never did business with them/gave it to them directly.
It's not right but the identity theft cat is out of the bag, which is why precautions like credit freezes, are recommended for all Americans.
But they have all other data as well and this concentration is dangerous.
And to me, it's specifically that that third party is Peter Thiel. Not the guy I want to trust with my data.
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It is a legal fiction invented by corporations to pass the blame onto you when criminals convinces the companies to give them money in your name.
Where possible, I believe it's our duty to educate those who know or care little about how their devices work. Unfortunately stats aren't persuasive for my family, but they might be for some as a starting point.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/victims-identity-th...
Victims of Identity Theft, 2021
October 2023, NCJ 306474
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/vit21.pdf
These links claim that identities are stolen, but do not explain how.
What happens to the victims, who are now presumably left unidentifiable? How are they tracked if they can’t be identified? Do their families recognise them? How does that work if they were married, had children or something? Does the identity thief just take over their whole life?
As far as I know, “identity theft” is a boogeyman invented by the banks. Traditionally, when someone would go to a bank and get a loan by pretending to be another person, we just called it “fraud”.
The banks realised that it would be nice to get you to feel some responsibility when they get defrauded, so after a bunch of focus grouping they came up with this new term to imply that you are somehow also a victim when the bank gets defrauded by someone else.
I would maybe reframe it as fraud being a natural downstream effect of identity theft. I don't need to steal anyone's identity to forge a check but that's also categorized as fraud.
Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term.
If a contractor takes my money to install a pool and then disappears, I don't need to reset my entire financial identity. I think it's worth having a separate idea to describe the situation as a whole and not just the specific vector in which a crime might have been committed.
> Identity theft also paints a clearer picture of what is required to remedy the situation. If your details have been pwnd hard enough, you might need to get new government documents entirely in order to protect yourself long term
Okay, but in the US (for example) you simply can’t do that, and your details are already available to everyone for a dollar or two.
I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.
> I’ll concede that “identity theft” could conceivably have a reasonable meaning in the context of e.g. Estonian digital identities where you could in a sense steal someone’s private key.
Stealing someone's private key still wouldn't be "identity theft", they'd just need to bootstrap a new key the same way they got the government to trust the previous one (and revoke the old one).
It's just victim-blaming and PR attempting to make companies not liable for their bad decisions.
It is because you think the contention is about being identifiable, while that is hardly the case.
Most people understand or at least accept that in order to facilitate payments and a company to follow various laws that are generally understood as "good for all" (like AML and tax avoidance), but require ID to access is not the same.
It is identical to accepting to paying for National Parks car pass or camp ground fees but protesting access fees. Not the same thing.
It is just the standard performative outrage over and over. The same person will be uploading their ID a few days after it is introduced.
So many people have internalized an anonymous audience that they are performing to in terms of what they think the anonymous audience wants to hear that they can't tell what is their own actual thoughts and motivations.
That is why the motivation changes two weeks later and the ID gets uploaded.
Some of us hold grudges on account of performative outrage. Ubisoft made invasive DRM the norm in gaming ~20 years ago. While other companies now do the same thing, I'm still boycotting. Fuck'em.
+1. You are not alone and please keep boycotting them. I personally do this and never use any websites or services requiring "ID check". If Gov agency wants my face and prints - Ok, I will give them on the border crossing and immigration services to get a passport. Everyone else goes to hell.
I'd say before Ubisoft, Valve was the one to really spearhead DRM by introducing online verification to play Half-Life 2. Before HL2, it was almost unthinkable for a game to require Internet access to be played and most copy protection relied on serial numbers and/or presence of the original game CD. HL2 was high profile enough to make people accept the restriction.
Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes? They could have directed Claude to disconnect all non-citizens when the order came, for example. Perhaps they don't to frighten people with that ability. But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
> Well, if all the data people uploaded to these models provided ironclad personal identification, would Anthropic need to have these identity verification processes?
> But most likely all the inputs together only add to a rough identity hash.
You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.
The identity verification they're doing is for legal purposes. Even if they have a way to take your name and IP address and figure out who you are with near-absolute certainty (including through the use of third-party databases), they're doing this so they have a legally-defensible process by which identities were established.
> You literally provide your name...
Not if you are using through your employer.
> they're doing for legal purposes
The USA is becoming a Banana Repulic. Having grown up in one, you end up learning that "the law" is never meant to be used for the benefit of the people but only to give the veneer of legitimacy for the authoritarian abuse by those in power.
“To my friends, anything; to my enemies, the law”: https://www.undp.org/latin-america/blog/graph-for-thought/%E...
Differential application of the law has been a part of American society for a very long time. I suppose you could argue that it's more brazen and accepted (or even celebrated in some cases) these days, but that could also be a function of people just being more willing to see it because America's reputation/standing in the world is in decline.
Right, but do you agree then this explains why people are not willing to give their identity details to a company, even if the company is able to deduct/obtain these details through other means if it wanted?
No. I really don't see the connection in this instance.
Many companies are required by law to verify the identities of their customers (for money laundering, sanctions compliance, etc.) and to do so in a certain way they can document.
Thinking that the US is a Banana Republic in which laws are applied differentially doesn't inherently mean that every rule that requires you to go through a process you don't like is unfair/unjust.
It's not a matter of being "unfair", it's a matter of people not trusting the institutions.
And? Yes, people have good reason to not trust institutions these days. But does not trusting institutions mean that you no longer have to comply with the rules, or that every rule is not based on a legitimate concern?
> not trusting institutions mean that you no longer have to comply with the rules
Not if you can avoid it, no.
> every rule is not based on a legitimate concern?
This particular rule is not based on a legitimate concern.
> This particular rule is not based on a legitimate concern.
Well, there are multiple legitimate reasons for Anthropic to ask some customers to do identity verification:
1. To comply with export controls.
2. To prevent abuse.
3. To process requests for increased usage or spend limits.
4. To defend against payment fraud.
This really isn't uncommon. I've been asked to do identity verification for something as innocuous as registering a domain name, setting up an account to bid on collectibles, etc.
If you've ever worked in ecommerce, payments or a related sector, you know how many bad actors are trying to game systems every single day and what the consequences are to the business if they succeed. Even when you're not dealing with non-negotiable compliance requirements (like KYC, export controls, etc.), there are lots of situations in which you'd have a reasonable need to establish that the people you're serving are who they say they are.
Yeah, we can come up with all sorts of reasons to justify their new policy, but at the end of the day it's clear that this policy only came after Fable got blocked. You keep trying to find a way to rationalize their action, when it is clear that the adopted this policy for one simple reason: it's an attempt to appease the US government.
Why is that? Why is so hard for you to see that Anthropic by pushing the "our models are so good that regular people should not have access to it" narrative, they ended up shooting themselves in the foot?
> You keep trying to find a way to rationalize their action, when it is clear that the adopted this policy for one simple reason: it's an attempt to appease the US government.
Your position seems to be based on lack of knowledge of the fact that the US government has broad authority to regulate AI services under existing national security and export control powers.
You can argue that those powers are wrong, but these powers are well-established and perfectly legal.
Anthropic could challenge these in court but, from what I've read, most attorneys specializing in this area of law believe it would face an uphill battle in courts because the related powers are so broad and well-established.
> seems to be based on lack of knowledge of the fact that the US government has broad authority to regulate AI services
I understand they have the authority. The point that you keep evading to answer is "Why Anthropic only? Why now?".
More than that: why do you keep arguing that people should just accept it? Why do you think that we should just roll over and accept these rules?
I am not asking you "what the courts would say", I am asking you personally: you really don't see a problem in normalizing a world where people can only conduct business if they subject themselves to give away personal data? Do you think that Surveillance Capitalism is just something that people need to accept as some natural state of affairs?
> I am not asking you "what the courts would say", I am asking you personally: you really don't see a problem in normalizing a world where people can only conduct business if they subject themselves to give away personal data?
Companies like Meta and Google collude with media/publishers/online service providers to track you across the web and use your data to target you for advertising even when you aren't registered or logged into their services. Data brokers whose names nobody knows gather and sell information about every single American. Credit bureaus track some of your most sensitive financial data whether you like or not, and sell it to companies who use it to make some of the most important decisions that affect you financially.
Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business with Anthropic for ID so that they can comply with sanctions laws is not the same thing.
> Companies like Meta and Google
This is some weird whataboutism, and it doesn't answer my question.
> Anthropic asking customers who voluntarily choose to do business
Anthropic is changing the terms. It used to be until last week that ID is not required. Now it is. Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway". This is the part I am struggling to understand.
> Anthropic is changing the terms. It used to be until last week that ID is not required. Now it is.
The Anthropic page related to ID verification is not new. It existed in April and had some minor changes made last week.
https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/
We can disagree, but please don't misrepresent the facts: new customers are not being required to verify their ID by default, nor are existing customers being contacted en masse to do so. ID verification is being used with some customers and it appears this is primarily related to account suspensions that are typically due to usage patterns, fraud concerns, etc.
> Some of these customers are now reconsidering their relationship, and it seems you are here saying they should just accept it without a second thought, because "this is what other companies do it anyway".
I'm not saying anything of the sort. What I am saying is that I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
Even though Anthropic says that its ID verification is not related to Mythos/Fable, in our discussion, I have pointed out that as a US company, Anthropic could be required to comply with various export controls that are implemented under well-established and perfectly-legal export control regulations.
It is also perfectly normal for companies to require ID verification for some customers under certain circumstances to address legitimate usage and fraud concerns.
> new customers are not being required to verify their ID by default
If they want to use Mythos, they need to provide the ID. It has become a two-class service.
> I find it odd to base a decision to close a Claude account on the basis that asking for ID verification represents an assault against privacy.
The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
> If they want to use Mythos, they need to provide the ID. It has become a two-class service.
You have no inherent, God-given legal right to access Mythos. Once again, the US government (and in particular the executive branch) has a broad and well-established legal authority to regulate advanced technologies under national security and export control regulations.
If you want to buy, say, the most advanced NVIDIA chips, you can be subject to verifications as well because these are subject to export controls.
> The decision does not have one specific reason. For example, I closed my account when they stopped allowing usage of OpenCode with a regular subscription. Some other people are now asking if the service they are getting is really worth it and if they should support a company which actively working towards this two-class system.
Anthropic is a private company. It is allowed to decide how to provision its service, and make changes to its service. This has absolutely nothing to do with "Surveillance Capitalism".
You have the right to vote with your wallet, which you have done. If enough people make the same decision, Anthropic will likely have to reconsider its decisions. That's capitalism, is it not?
These are a lot of rationalizations for you to justify the actions of a company whose CEO talks a lot about ethics, but when push comes to shove acts like any other corporate drone.
Also, you are talking a lot about what Anthropic can do but completely evading to actually say what you think they should do. It tells me that you know how reprehensible their ethics are, but for some reason you refuse to reject them.
We've had an interesting back-and-forth about identity verification but it seems that you don't really care about that issue.
It seems that you just don't like the way Anthropic is run, and a focal point of that is that you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
To be clear: the US government issued an order that required Anthropic to suspend access to Fable and Mythos by any foreign national. The company had to comply or it could face significant penalties. According to the company, the only way it could comply with the government order was to suspend access to everyone.
The ID verification page being discussed here has been around since before this order was issued. Like many companies, Anthropic may ask some customers for ID verification, primarily to prevent fraud and abuse. ID verification is not required to sign up, and existing customers are not all being asked to perform it.
Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged, but not making the latest and greatest models available to everyone who wants them and complying with legal government orders are not the strongest arguments about their ethical shortcomings.
> it seems that you don't really care about that issue.
Not in the particular. What I care about is the concentration of power and having to live in a world where a handful of corporations fully dictate how everyone should work.
> you're unhappy you can't access Fable and Mythos.
Not at all. I don't personally care. You can find me on record saying that I'd rather work with local models that are "dumber" but can simply assist me through a process, instead of outsourcing all my thinking to a huge LLM.
> Frankly, I think a lot of these companies are ethically-challenged
But you are still sticking by them, aren't you? Why?
> You literally provide your name, email address, address and credit card number when you create an account and subscribe.
I don't recall Anthropic's payment systems, but I use Paypal wherever supported. I don't think Paypal sends my address, but am not sure. I'm pretty sure they don't send the CC information.
And often, not even the name (e.g. have often had people use my CC to buy stuff (with my permission)).
Also, I still routinely buy stuff from one service that thinks I'm in a state I haven't lived in for over 20 years, because that's the address I provided back then.
So no, generally, sending your payment info doesn't equate to sending them my address.
https://www.paypal.com/us/privacy-center/privacy-practices
> When you check out with PayPal, the merchant will receive info that is necessary to process the transaction and prevent fraud. This may include:
> Your name, email address, amount received
> Your shipping address and phone number
PayPal sends everything you listed to the merchant except for CC number.
> These situations pass. Administrations change. Technology evolves. We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
The big problem American policy makers (and business leaders) don't understand is that they tend to minimize or ridicule extremely serious events.
There's a pre-Greenland and post-Greenland annexation threats for European Nato allies, and it is non reversible. EU allies do not forget that the US (the only country to ever call article 5 or to gather NATO allies for operations) has both mistreated the alliance, and has been the only power to threaten militarily EU countries.
Same happens here. Business-level wise, you seem to be talking with a very American-centric point-of-view, like these events are minor and temporary issues and we're all here waiting to throw money at an abusive relationship.
But this is not how we operate in EU. None of us can afford to build their operations based on uncertainty of US export controls. The damage is here and many of us are replacing Claude/GPT subscriptions with shared opencode servers using GLM and DS4.
Might be slightly worse? Probably. But we can work on it, harness it, get experience, and even update back to American models at some point. But we're no longer going to be building assuming US models availability.
You're way off the mark, and probably viewing this as an American.
If it happens once that means it can happen which means it can happen at any time.
When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
> When you feel you're a 2nd class person, or 'other', you're not eager to empower your oppressor, quite the opposite.
Completely agree.
You're acting like you can't just switch which llm you are using in around an hour.
I mean...use opus/fable when you can, if down the road your access gets cut then just switch to kimi or whatever.
Yeah, this sucks, but you're being really dramatic and acting like you can't switch llms with basically no lock in. Getting something like your email cut off would be a real thing to be concerned about, but this isn't that.
This decision has, effectively, turned LMMs into a supply chain risk.
Before this incident I’d gladly use any anthropic LLM in production features. Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight.
If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
If the software your business depends on can't run indefinitely without getting permission to operate from someone else's systems, then you're perpetually at risk of someone else tanking your business because they decided that you can no longer use that software.
Anyone doing product integrations should recognize it’s a perpetual risk but why stick to the platform that will require US citizenship demands for future models especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?
Anthropic didn’t have to beg for the government to deem their models a security crisis.
> ...especially when there are other labs with reasonably comparable performance that don’t require this?
This access restriction could be
1) A legitimate concern about capabilities.
2) A hype-generation scheme entered into by both the Federal Government and Anthropic.
3) Pettiness.
If we're in situation #1 or #3, then there are no other LLM providers that provide comparable services that are safe from this.
If we're in situation #2... well, I guess how safe you are from this is a factor of how desperately the company needs "wau, look how scary our software is!1!1" hype.
> Right now, this has become a risky decision that can tank my business overnight. If your business-critical systems rely on SAAS that doesn't have a solid SLA and breach-of-contract provisions that more than cover the damages in the event, you've made "a risky decision that can tank [your] business overnight".
I'm pretty sure that a US government export restriction / ban / etc. would count as a force majeure invalidating all the fancy wording you could wish for on a piece of paper.
The only way to actually control is to self manage in an environment you control.
The long term goal of LLMs is to automate most white collar work, so wasn’t that a risk you faced anyway? Like Amazon basics, which took all the easy to replicate goods they saw on their marketplace.
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past.
But not on a SaaS whose continued availability you'd rely on.
In any case, your optimism is bordering on naivety. The world has seen how the US can easily disregard anything and act arbitrarily - sanctions, tariffs, shutting down access to SaaSes - and this will not be forgotten. As you say, administrations change. Even if next time around there are competent adults in the White House (which really isn't a given), do you really want to bet your business on that not changing 4 years later?
There's a reason why all the big cloud providers are constantly shouting about their "sovereign" solutions. The US has broken everyone's trust and there is no going back on that.
> This is a crazy conclusion for a situation that isn’t even two weeks old...
I think, this is all a culmination of rapidly eroding trust and soft power between US & its allies for the past 3y.
What allies?
You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
They will obviously come back from that no questions about it. It’s like an abusive relationship that CA/EU can’t fully eject from, there will always be hope of conciliation because the benefits both ways are so massive and the relationships are so entrenched, it will take much more than DJT and Republicans/dark enlightenment technocrats to completely fracture these alliances.
Agreed. Things are really bad right now. But they've been bad before. We helped rebuild Germany after they started world wars.
What, all of us? I would suggest that Russia's proxy leaders threatened to invade both those places specifically to weaken US alliances and hurt NATO.
So when did we become Russia? Better you should ask, should we become Russia, would we like it? We've only begun to experience the damage of it and I figure part of the plan is that once we notice and object to what's been done to us, it'll be too late.
You are mad if you think we are not the target here. This is not about hurting Greenland, it's about hurting US and people elsewhere should take note because you are subject to the same tactics and the same influences.
> What allies?
> You threatened to invade Canada and Greenland.
> You surely don't think you're coming back from that?
Trump threatened. Those were unserious remarks by an unserious person who's 80 years old. If that was all it takes to permanently demolish those alliances, they were never actually there.
No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.
And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
> No no, the remarks were pretty damn fucking serious.
Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
> And the fact that the US could elect such an unserious and demented criminal, twice is proof enough that there is a lot to worry about. Who's to say who will be next? Or after that?
Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
This completely ignores the very real, very serious damage he's doing right now, and the doors he's opening for future leaders. Discounting the dumb things he says is very dangerous. His words could lead to oh, I don't know - an insurrection?
it takes time to build up an army, we are not a unified Europe. I think both are happening at the moment - We are building our military, we are taking over "supporting" Ukraine as Trump is stepping away from that. And im sure there is some hope that the US will go back to the way it was.
Imagine you outsourced your entire company to a third party company and only have a few managers around. Then, you need to move all that support from the 3rd parties back in-house. Its not a task that is easy to do, and if we also take into account the required factories etc that need to be built to support, that takes even more time.
Its something that is happening, we are building new trade agreements with countries around the world, excluding the US. We are working on our own defense packs, and eventually if the US decides to leave NATO, or we form our own alliance, then that will happen.
And Trump was elected with the support and influence of the very cadre of oligarchs running much of silicon valley: Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, etc., etc.
Elon Musk (not Trump) is actively still weaponizing algorithmic control of X to try to destabilize US "allies". Larry Ellison is doing the same thing with a whole swathe of media companies and TikTok.
The issue is the authoritarianism and patriarchal narcissism of an American-centered global elite who have gotten so used to "winning" they began to think it was God-given right and not something they'd achieved because their winning had (broadly speaking) been in everyone else's interest.
Now that their mindset has shifted to win at all (read: everyone one else's) cost(s) - do you REALLY think that everyone is going to blindly keep following? For how long?
> Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
> Ok, then. If you're serious: kick the US out of NATO. Increase military spending, go it alone. Really treat the US as a non-ally.
What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter. And European countries are increasing military spending, by and large buying, in that order, domestic, European, major NATO aligned suppliers (most notably South Korea), and the US only when there is no choice (so F-35 and munitions/replacements for existing systems). And of course this ignores that current European military capabilities are plenty for European strategic autonomy.
> Or, you know. Wait for him to leave office or die (he's 80!), and write the Democrats and tell them to get their fucking house in order. Trump didn't win so much as the Democrats were utterly incompetent.
I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come. The American political system is broken beyond repair, and even the opposition to the current wannabe fascist regime are not campaigning to change anything about it. This means that regardless of who's in power next, even if they're the best thing since sliced bread, there is no guarantee the following elections won't bring another bout of wannabe fascists threatening to invade their allies.
There is no going back from that without major political reform in the US and years to earn back trust. AKA not happening. Even the opposition, even the most radical opposition, venerate American political institutions as the works of deities that can only be slightly changed, not replaced wholesale. And, from the outside, the whole system - how elections are done (you need proportional representation, term limits, no janky districts), representative structures (flat two seat per state senate doesn't work anymore, house of representatives having skewed and fixed numbers doesn't either), judicial system (political appointments and elections, and for life appointments, do not work), supreme court (political appointments and for life appointments do not work), etc are overdue by decades for serious structural reforms.
>> Trump says a lot of things. It's foolish to take every outrage seriously. It's pretty clear it's just a tactic of his (albeit a dumb one).
> And he has also acted on a lot of the things he has said. It's foolish to ignore him.
Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on.
> What? It's not possible to expell a country from NATO as per its charter.
So what? You're claiming the alliance is irreparably broken, who cares about the text of a treaty?
Just do it, put your money where your mouth is.
> I don't think you're getting it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The trust with the US is irreversibly broken and not getting repaired in the decades to come.
I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
> So what? You're claiming the alliance is irreparably broken, who cares about the text of a treaty
The alliance is broken, yes, and everyone is treating it as much. Kicking the US out, other than being impossible, will only piss off the petulant children.
> Did he invade Greenland? Bomb Canada? Those are the specific outrageous things he said that we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, he created his outrage and distractions there, and moved on
He was damn close to attacking Greenland, so much so that various European nations felt the need to send soldiers there to show they're commited to defending it. It doesn't matter that he didn't actually do the absurd.
> I don't think you get it, either: how long can you maintain that attitude without the irritant (the 80-year-old person that is Donald Trump)?
Geopolitical priorities and alignments take years to shift. So does military procurement. Once the US is no longer reliable, it will take years of reliability before there is a chance to mend the relationship.
> Also, you're acting all outraged, but present in your messages (but unacknowledged) are other and more tangible violations of trust, like European countries shirking their military spending commitments and letting their militaries decline to disrepair, because they expected the US to defend them forever for free.
I'm sorry, but that is just pure grade A American bullshit. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence to spout such nonsense. Various European countries spend to various extents. Nobody, is getting protection for "free". They're all pitching in to different levels (some like Poland, France, UK, definitely more than others). And the US was getting plenty in exchange, most notably bases to run their famous and intimidating logistics. The US definitely loses more out of losing those than European nations that have the British and French nuclear umbrellas if it push came to shove.
It's the fact that he wasn't immediately removed from office that's the underlying problem.
This sort of casual dismissal is precisely why the relationship won't be repaired.
We deployed troops to Greenland after his comments. Does that sound unserious to you?
That's not how democracy works. You have responsibility and accountability. These people can and do real harm.
That’s like claiming Iran didn’t ever threaten North Korea, USA etc but only their leaders. Trump is the guy Americans had choosen to decide their foreign policy. Just like Russians can’t claim they are innocent just because of what their leaders do Americans have even less excuse.
Over-reliance on a single LLM is probably not a good idea, no matter who owns it.
> past 3y
since January 2025
it’s been a loooooooong year and a half
Crypto export ban lasted only about 45 years. :)
These are obvious lies. But whatever man, they just updated privacy policy to say they may ask you to verify age or identity.
US controls on cryptography software lasted _20 years_. If there's something I'm absolutely certain of, and I'm certain of very little in the fields of AI and of politics, it's that Fable will be utterly irrelevant in 20 years time.
> Despite what’s being implied everywhere, this ID check page has been there since April.
Well, irrespective over as to whether this is the case, the blog entry from claude came yesterday, aka June:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-ver...
So, why the two months delay here? If they felt all was already said, they would not have had a need to repeat what they wrote two months ago already that mandatory age sniffing is required for all claude users.
What makes you believe this is about export controls rather than harvesting data?
Mass surveillance and all the other that gets associated with mass surveillance
What makes you believe he belives that?
The sentence does not state he believes the ID check is for export control purposes
In fact, earlier in the comment, he argues the ID check dates back to April
Because of this sentence?
> LLMs are not the first tech product that have been restricted by export controls.
> We’ve had export restrictions on different chips and even cryptography software in the past. It doesn’t last forever.
Yeah, in the long everything will happen, from 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 being the winning Powerball numbers to heat death of the universe, but as the colloquial goes "ain't nobody got time for that!"
Once an institution or person has proven that they will take adverse action against you, it is foolish to bank on them again.
Export controls have typically been for physical goods. Don’t remember the last time it was used for an API
You should look up the words "crypto wars". There were absolutely very annoying attempts by the US government to limit encryption, forcing every software maker to maintain two editions of their software: one targeting the domestic audience with no restrictions, and one "international edition" which had to intentionally weakened encryption (as in ship with shorter key lengths).
Have we all forgotten PGP already? (Not an API, but certainly not a "physical good")
I also think this makes OpenAI and Anthropic even less viable. They're tens of billions in debt, losing money every month, have data center commitments in the hundreds of billions, and now they're reducing their market to the US? The only way this can work is with substantial government subsidies.
And a fraction of the US market at that. Requiring ID scans and all of this nonsense to use a chatbot just added a whole layer of friction that many are going to just nope on out of and use one of the endless other services. I suppose the next step will be for the government to try to ban those other services once they mature and start booming.
Definitely damaging for their IPOs
Tragic.
subsidies what like space x or tesla?
shhh, the investors might hear you. If they do then the bubble pops, all those data centre projects grind to a halt, 5% of US GDP disappears, and the USA goes into a deep recession.
Of course, as you say, this would require govt funds to fix. Congress gets asked for funding to save the US economy, and various members of the Trump dynasty pop up in unexpected non-exec directorships for companies receiving those funds.
easy IPO cashout
> 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
> Note the big cut in token prices from China.
After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.
and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.
> and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.
They don't need to. They can undermine the West economically and politically.
The US has been a much more violent imperial power but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
You don't know what you're talking about. Russians occupied my country, killed almost no one, and yet it was far worse than all the economic damage caused by Western neoliberalism.
US imperialism has been a blight to the world, outright killing millions. Modern China did nothing on that scale.
I think you misread my comment.
> ...but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.
"What IT has done overseas" refers to the US.
But as for China, the Great Leap Forward is considered the largest man-made famine in history, causing somewhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of irreplicable artifacts and historical sites.
Like the US, China has been involved in sowing discord and destruction in other countries. What the US did in Cambodia was an absolute travesty. But China was Pol Pot's primary backer, having provided around $1 billion in economic and military aid to the Khmer Rouge. So it's not like China was an idle witness to what happened in Indochina last century.
We can argue all day about the greater and lesser of two evils but my point remains: powerful countries can cause significant harm to the world without invading other countries.
You do realize that your quoted figure of 15 and 55 million deaths, came from looking at population figures and assuming that everybody Pre great famine would have the exact same number of children and those children will have the exact same number of children as the starting point.
And is just pure nonsense, might as well claim that the US killed 548 million people, because in 1957 the US population was 172 million and had a TFR of 3.62 , assuming that trend held we would be at 720 million in 2026
Yes, I did interpret "it" as referring to China, not US, in that sense I misread it.
I agree that Great Famine was horrible.
My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs (and actually dead people) any day. (Which was kind of the point of EHS, even in it's most neoliberal incarnation.)
> My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs...
The problem is that most of the time, economic war ends with tanks and bombs.
That's not true, and anyway it's quite simplistic view of history.
And yet it is China who has, for the last 40+ years, successfully used the "start cheap, destroy competition, rise prices" tactic.
Why are you complaining, thats just the free market doing its thing.
[dead]
Taiwan? South China Sea?
Comparatively tiny issues compared to US actions in the past several decades.
See how this comment plays out in the next 5 years.
Here's my prediction: Trump eventually crumbles, but is replaced by an equally (but differently) inept establishment Democrat figure. Conversations about inequality and wealth taxation in the West continue to be (increasingly) suppressed. Backlash against both inequality and related anticapitalist speech suppression continues to grow. Capital interests continue to use redirection (culture wars, race wars, religious wars, etc.) as a diversionary tactic. China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace. America's silicon and software advantage quickly evaporates. Economic advantage follows soon after (already in progress due to USD debt crisis and associated inflation). Africa and Latin America continue to shift towards China or neutrality. South Asia follows a bit later. North America and Europe remain indecisive and overreliant on America, American tech, and USD financial markets. Taiwan becomes increasingly pro-China/pro-unification as South Asia reorients towards Chinese hegemony while Western hegemony continues to crumble in on itself due to its inability to reign in overcompetition (capture) which stifles innovation and deteriorating material conditions sew ever increasing conflict and fragmentation.
Tl;dr: The West competes itself into irrelevance while China cooperates its way to victory.
Whether or not the information war turns into a kinetic war depends largely on the West's ability to recognize that coercion, deception, and manipulation in the pursuit of dominance is not really an effective strategy in an information war.
> China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace.
The trouble with authoritarian governments is that they depend on competence in the authority.
Xi is 73 now.
Single party states in general, and communist China in particular, don't have a stellar track record of handling power transfers gracefully.
Republic of China is not China, lol
On that front I think you’re badly mistaken. China’s government publicly states that it doesn’t see our idea of society and government as a good idea. They are a rivalling system, with very different values.
The US is many things, but it’s still way more aligned with European, Canadian, Australian etc goals than China ever will be.
I just got finished setting up an environment with MiMo-Pro-2.5-UltraSpeed, Qwen-3.7-Max (basically used this to sub in for Opus), and of course DeepSeek.
Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even better.
You need to look up loss leader strategy and dumping in international trade because that is what china is doing. And your use of their models over api is giving them training data.
They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.
But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.
The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.
Most the Chinese models are open source. You can buy some hardware and go run them yourself, if you really are concerned about "dumping" and "loss leaders".
But you do see that supports my argument right? For every one of Us that stops paying monthly subscription or api costs to OpenAI/anthropic/google the smaller their market gets. Taken to enough scale and they won’t reach profitability.
So while I am running local models I am aware of the geopolitical implications
Why do you care about geopolitical implications? (I don't see how it supports your argument, sorry.)
What do you think my argument is?
China isn’t releasing open weight models for the good of humanity. They are releasing them to undermine US companies financial viability.
I care about that because that competition affects me.
I don't know what your argument is. Maybe some US companies won't be financially viable - so what? I mean if it affects you, you have stake in those companies, fair enough. But it's not a geopolitical problem - most US citizens even (not to mention the rest of the world) will be better off if they have access to public models.
I made the same switch. Impressed with the sheer value of Deepseek v4 Pro and Minimax M3 so far. I mostly work on an open source academic simulation tool, so I’m happy to be a source of training data.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
> 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.
Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really hard to justify giving Anthropic any more money. I'm very tempted to switch to GLM 5.2.
> banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free
It should go without saying, but "the free" in "the land of the free" refers to Americans, not everyone else. Not sure if you were trying to make it sound like a great irony that "the land of the free" would exclude or ban people, but if so it doesn't quite hit the mark. A more cutting criticism would be that the land of the free isn't letting one of its own companies freely compete.
Fair point. The fact that even americans got cut off from Fable is definitely ironic though. I suppose that's going to be fixed now that they're implementing identity verification. And even that runs smack into the concept of freedom since freedom under surveillance isn't real.
But given the hoopla about how a driver’s license isn’t valid in the SAVE act because it doesn’t prove you’re a US citizen, how is drivers license verification going to satisfy the US national requirement here?
It probably won't. It will probably have to be a U.S. passport.
Many states have extra markings on the card for citizens vs legal residents. A valid birth certificate would also be enough since the US is one of the only nations to recognize birthright citizenship.
Also worth pointing out that most Americans don't have passports and getting one can take anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months.
Also, you'd have to be smoking something to assume that the three letter agencies are not going to be combing through Anthropic's customer list and assessing for fraud and foreign bad-actors. If you lie, they'll probably catch you eventually and most people are not stupid enough to lie about their identity to the US government and think they'll get away with it forever.
It doesn't even refer to all Americans. Just the wealthy ones. And even that is increasingly reduced to just the wealthy ones who support Donald Trump.
It's always been a catchy propaganda slogan. Nothing more.
What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?
I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan
Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.
The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.
However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.
I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.
Are you me? Anyway I wonder if you've played with the following, they've been what I've been using to patch CC:
https://github.com/skrabe/tweakcc-fixed https://github.com/skrabe/lobotomized-claude-code
Yeah I know about tweakcc, even had some custom prompts committed to my dotfiles repository for a while. For some reason it wasn't working for me, don't remember why.
At first I used this shell script here:
https://gist.github.com/roman01la/483d1db15043018096ac3babf5...
Someone posted it on HN on the Opus degradation thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
I just kept using it to fix the prompts for a long time. Eventually I asked Claude to port it to Python to make it easier to maintain. Now every month or so Claude dissects the Claude Code binary and integrates the script with the newest version.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/%7E/.lo...
Thanks for the info. Yeah tweakcc is finicky, in fact it broke again for me with the latest CC update. Maybe I'll end up with my own solution as well in the end.
Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.
Yeah for a side project I just switched over to DS4 and between Pro and Flash a few days ago I've spent $1.96 both for code work and some large LLM text processing tasks.
It feels to me as good as the last version of Opus I was using (I think 4.6 or 7?). I'm going direct through the DeepSeek API, not Openrouter.
33 cents? That's insane... I set up an API cost meter on my Claude Code status line and it frequently runs into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
My build/work is probably a lot simpler than yours, but still, a huge value for me for just 33 cents.
Minimum spend/fill is US$2 plus Chinese vat (dunno why but not gonna complain about 6%)
For the 100$ I'm paying for Claude, I'm pretty sure I can use Deepseek way more than I can use Opus via the plan.
Fair. If you trust the stats on Codeburn I've used $6k USD of tokens in the last month with Claude as a very heavy user, so our situations may differ
The downside are opportunity costs - not using other models to make better decision, I guess, right?
usage billing over the monthly plan when deepseek is over x25 cheaper?
Maybe I'll try out a month on the usage plan and see how it compares dollar for dollar. I think I'm squeezing about as much as I can out of Anthropic under the plan
As an American founder I am sorry for this. I think the world needs to band together to take geopolitical risk out of AI.
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.
Persona already had scandals earlier this year:
- https://cybernews.com/privacy/persona-leak-exposes-global-su...
- https://hothardware.com/news/discord-drops-persona-after-use...
It’s off putting outside of HN
The Peter Thiel connection is especially toxic for a lot of people outside the US. Whether it's substantive or just optics doesn't make a huge difference.
Its optics. Personas series D is from his fund. Rich guy tries to get richer is the primary take away.
> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on
Why? Is Claude really so much better that the additional hassle and privacy invasion is worth it? What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?
Heck, considering the volatility of the LLM industry, shouldn't everyone already be using OpenRouter & friends to avoid getting screwed over by the model-of-the-week - making a switch absolutely trivial?
Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.
> What's stopping people from switching to one of the dozen or so other AI tools?
I’m lazy.
I will simply upload my drivers license to Claude, and continue paying $200/month.
Subscription prices. Anthropic subscription can't be used with third party harnesses. OpenRouter would require me to pay API prices.
This is the reason.
Sure if you want to share your ID and information with Persona.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632
That remains to be seen. Assuming the worst from the start discourages people from taking any action and is an imprudent way to approach political topics.
Completely disagree that 99% of people will just do it.
A lot of people are already skeptical of the frontier labs - I moved over to Claude from OpenAI when they bent over for the US government. And I'll certainly move on again if Claude start asking for photo ID.
> 99+% of people will just do the ID verification and move on.
In a vacuum yes. But this space isn't vacuum, I'm going with path of least resistance.
It's pretty obvious this has nothing to do with Fable
> Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate
I'm starting to see more and more of this: speed matters more than model, skills matter more than model, cost matters more, harness matters more than model. It seems like until we have a step change in models (and Fable isn't it), there's a lot of room to optimise with what we already have.
This is a stark change to the "best model at all costs" mentality from a year ago.
The government mandate forcing them to restrict access of new models to American has really cut their legs under them.
This identity verification is a best effort to kinda stay afloat: they can now offer bleeding edge models to US nationals, but not to the other 95% of the world. Their influence is gonna tank quite seriously if the previous mandate is not reversed.
Realistically, their choices are to either implement this, or restrict access to new models entirely, which is a sure way to fall into complete irrelevance.
The worst part is that the entire ban is zero step thinking. The US is showing the world that even when it has the best tech it's too politically unstable to rely on as a serious partner.
Worse, doing this forces other nations to catch up to compete. Once they have, what happens next? An AI arms race that the US may not win? Someone else opens their Fable class model first and takes the multi-trillion dollar market that could have been run by a US company?
There is no n-step positive outcome for the USA. The only winning move was not to play.
> 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.
Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true.
I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.
Why, is there any evidence to support your claim?
There is a long history of US export restrictions on technologies. They have all been temporary.
It would be extraordinary if this was the beginning of the first ever permanent technology export restriction.
Temporary as in it lasted for quite some years, not temporary as in it was dropped within months. That's a very long timescale for this sort of field.
From outside the US, there has been so much "extraordinary" stuff happening in US politics recently that it's almost expected now.
It doesn't matter, because people are adopting AI now, and even if the restrictions are lifted tomorrow, it has been proven that relying on an American SaaS is risky, because you can just lose access.
So why would you get that instead of self-hosting Mistral Studio and fine tuning for your needs? Or going fully DIY with e.g. OpenShift AI and open source Chinese models?
That way you fully control availability, costs and quality.
Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.
Even if it's never lifted, probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.
Open models will catch up to Opus 4.8 and state of the art will, most likely, continue to get better. It won't be long before "better than Opus 4.8" is not a big deal.
> Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.
Totally meaningless.
"This particular band of gambling addicts have bet money on a particular outcome at a ratio of 68:32, so there is a 32% chance of it happening."
Wow, how informative. Maybe I should go check my horoscope for if the Iran war will end next week...
> probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.
If you buy the story that Anthropic's marketing hype drove US regulation, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The best case real reason is Anthropic pissed off the administration.
Which will leave OpenAI, Google, Meta, and X far more vulnerable to government data sharing requests... and KYC identity is incredibly valuable to mandate for those.
That is my best guess too, which is an even better case for better-than-Opus-4.8 models being available from OpenAI without drawing the attention of the administration.
I do think their marketing hype was a factor though even in this narrative. Andrew Jassy tells a vengeful admin that there's this jailbreak for a model Anthropic said was dangerous, and vengeful admin seizes the opportunity to take vengeance.
I think any optimism about future OpenAI models is discounting the avarice of the current US administration.
Having succeeded with Anthropic, it's reasonable to expect their next attempt will be:
"Nice new model, OpenAI, would be a shame if national security concerns tangled up a public release. Now let's talk about equity stakes..."
My belief that OpenAI will release a model better than Opus 4.8 globally should not be interpreted as a claim that they will avoid a shakedown. I think if they encounter corruption, they will engage with it.
GLM 5.2 is better than opus 4.8 bro what are you talking about
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to.
Your overall argument makes some sense, but I would bet any money this simply is not true. Even if the US maintains some of the restrictions on export (which is in no way a given with how fickle this administration is, let alone the next administration), as LLMs advance, Fable will eventually be considered a lower tier model, and is likely to have restrictions lifted.
That makes it better, paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.
> paying money to always having access to the second rate models from US AI providers. The problem remains.
Your alternative:
Pay a Chinese or EU company for a third rate model.
The choice is yours.
>"The choice is yours."
I think (probably except cases with regulatory restrictions) most will very much prefer to pay for "second rate" models from other suppliers, including China and help them to become premium choice.
not if they run out of investments to train their cutting edge models. Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are going to be a massive flop if they aren't able to sell their best models to the world.
They do catch up.
Which is why I said the overall argument makes sense.
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.
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.
GLM 5.2 is far better than deepseek V4. Seriously feels like I’m talking to a Claude model. Also burns tokens like one, so there is that. Deepseek is unbeatable on price/quality.
Honestly just give it time. This stuff moves so fast next month the conversation will be different. For folks who don’t like the ID privacy issues, use Deepseek et al and it should be able to get the job done even if the experience takes a bit more wrangling.
The problem with the ID verification is that they can pair introspective conversations with ID. Either that bothers people or it doesn’t.
Main point: we can’t fret about current state models because the ID verification has future implications. Models will change and competition will catch up. Do what feels right in the long run not whether TODAYS model is better at Anthropic.
I agree with this, my disagreement was strictly with saying that the current open models are as good as Opus.
They're not. And by the time they are Open AI and Anthropic will probably be onto the next thing.
Not sure what happened to Google in all this. They're falling out of the frontier race.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to continue training models indefinitely.
Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference.
Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions if its going to get blocked?
Of course this can't go on forever. Especially not on LLMs. But are we really close to the limits of what these LLMs can do? I'm not sure we are.
The difference between GPT-5/Opus 4 and GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8 is striking. For software development anyway, there's no comparison. And all this has happened in a year.
My assumption is there will be another 2-3 years of improvements ahead of us on LLMs alone. Through hardware upgrades, larger training runs, better data quality, better algorithms, etc.
Of course, by then these models will be quite expensive. Will my company pay for it? I don't know. I'm sure some people will though.
some people will, but they will have to bear the costs being the only users of llms sustained through billions of dollars of funding.
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.
Using even double the total tokens and taking, what, 2-3x the time?, still seems worth it if prices are 5x+ cheaper (which OpenRouter [1] claims is the case).
On NeuralWatt for my personal projects at home (not affiliated, just a happy customer), I get so much more mileage out of GLM than I get out of Claude at work, specifically because it's priced as a hammer I can pound any nail-shaped-object with, not a delicacy I need to carefully budget-analyze to try to figure out if it's worth burning my monthly spend limits on this task.
https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...
I thought true token use was being hidden by anthropic and openai both
No, they do specify token counts, as they let you pay for them. They just don't tell you what these thinking tokens actually are.
Though because they don't show you, they could be lying about it. Very unlikely, I think, would be too dangerous IMO. But technically possible
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
Not exactly. The close buddy with the owners of several other AI companies who has a known dispute with Anthropic and who has seized near-absolute power in the US is doing something that damages Anthropic. The fact that it also destroys long term prospects for the US overall is irrelevant because the individual can't think ahead and also doesn't care about the future of the US.
It's nearly the same thing in the end, but helpful to understand the cause.
> I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access
That is very well put.
If they have a year sub, then yes I agree (even if it’s implicitly always part of the risk of buying so far in advance) but if they are month to month this position is absolutely nonsensical.
You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.
Hopefully Persona is a non-starter for many. At this point I'm done with Anthropic, I'll be a non-paying subscriber to any of the US based "Frontier" providers. I've been finding far more value in how the models are used vs leaning only on the brute force of a SotA model. Between the Fable / Mythos FUD and scare mongering that Anthropic continues to prance around with I can't take them even remotely seriously anymore. Just like with early iterations of ChatGPT these founders have acted like they're sitting on AGI. But just like with those earlier versions of ChatGPT we'll look at frontier models a year from now and laugh at how off base Dario has been, again as he's been very off base for the last couple of years. I'm still waiting for half of white collar jobs to be replaced next week...
> As a non-US citizen
...
> My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models
May I suggest using Cortecs.ai then? OpenRouter is US-based as well and since you have been bitten by this already perhaps it's really time to change course? :)
Thanks for the suggestion, I am looking into it, it looks promising and I like that the pricing model is very upfront
I’ve been using GLM-5.2 on openrouter with pi and, while I’ve only been playing with it for a couple days, seems stronger than Opus 4.8, nearly on the level of Fable for coding/architecture tasks.
There’s no way I’m giving a random foreign company my ID.
I’m really enjoying the phone-controlled sessions with Claude, and the models do good work; but if I’m asked to validate my ID, we’re done.
I already have Aivo and Pi somewhat similarly configured. Just give me a reason and I’m giving my money to someone else. In Europe, if you have my ID it’s not that hard to get me into trouble. And there’s no safeguard that Persona won’t be hacked, it’s not like they encrypt the ID with my own keys or something.
> The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
> The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market
The issue is that there is no "international LLM market." America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge. I routinely use Qwen and GPT-OSS (locally) for things I don't want to share with Anthropic, but they are clearly inferior to SOTA cloud models.
How does it follow that there’s no “international LLM market” just because one party is ahead of another? There’s an international car market even though some cars are better/worse than others.
> America is leading the AI race, and while Chinese open weight models are great, they aren't quite bleeding edge.
this sentiment is far too commonplace in my opinion.
just because the BMW x5 exists doesn’t mean rav4 isn’t used by far far far more people.
the rav4 is close enough for most people to the x5 and way cheaper.
if deepseek is close enough and significantly cheaper, which direction do we think the market will go once the hype trash moves on and people realize how much of the hype trash is just botted algorithms?
Kings come and go. These types of decisions can actually kill a king. Not instantly, of course. But still.
I don't believe US government wanted to restrict the model use to US citizens only. The bad actors will and can find their ways around it.
They do however want strict measures in place to avoid abuse, and the export control was the only tool they had to stop Anthropic from releasing the model.
Though I also wonder if it's even possible to patch things without severely crippling the abilities of the model.
This strikes me as bluster. You use Anthropic because they offer the best model, if China offered a better model you would use them. You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model but the truth is as long as Anthropic continue to serve a better model than China, you will use it.
Definitionally, slightly better than China should always be fine for export.
> You’re trying to signal that you deserve Anthropic’s best model
You think some people aren't "deserving" of the best models?
Not an argument I made. A summary of the argument OP was making.
The entire internet will be real id verified soon. You won't even be able to send packets without a hardware digital signature linked to a real id. Might as well get used to it.
I bet that if you don't use companies that enforce these verifications, and they start to lose money, things will shift very fast.
No. Google and Apple are already rolling out the infrastructure. FCC is requiring IDs for phones. It will be opt-in for a while but the acceleration of AI risks will inevitably lead to an infrastructure level lock down of the entire internet. 99% of the population will accept it without hesitation because it is no different than what they do already. Everything you do online is already logged and tracked. The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
"The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity." what an absolute crock.
> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
What utter nonsense.
> The only thing moving to digital real id does is prevent criminal activity.
As defined by the politicians bought and paid for by the corporations via their lobbyists.
You actually think this is a good thing?
> FCC is requiring IDs for phones.
Sources?
https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-421309A1.pdf
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35134-new-fcc-rule-requirin...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/if-the-fcc-bans-burner-pho...
All of these appear to be proposals only.
Worse than that. You're funding models and an ecossystem that discriminates you.
I don't know what was the hype about Fable. It was crap. This more looks like PR stunt by the US government to prop up the failing product.
Now everyone talks about Fable and wants Fable.
Having used it for limited time when it was available, I don't miss it at all.
I wanted Fable in order to harden my C project against exploits and vulnerabilities. Anthropic downgraded me to Opus 4.8 every single time I tried to do it.
So I don't even know if I miss it. I suppose that's equivalent to never having used Fable at all.
Claude has been doing this to me even without Fable, trying to write a Xaw frontend for the moc music player.
> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to
No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.
Please do yourself a favour and check out GLM-5.2, Qwen-3.7-Max, MiMo-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-V4-Pro.
And then for stuff that you already said you were able to use Mistral for... Qwen-3.6 (option to run locally), MiMo-2.5, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, or... many, many other models to choose from too.
right now the best contender is GLM 5.2, right?
either this or stick with Codex until the US government cripples it too
You underestimate how large the US market is.
AI was always going to be geo-politically fragmentary. As soon as we started talking about it like a utility it was clear that every country was going to be strongly limited to the resources it could develop and the infrastructure it could build out. The US and China will still be selling hardware, managing infrastructure and licensing models and yes the domestic market is massive.
you understimate how large the international market is, for example, half of google's revenue is generated from international markets.
Only *half of Google's revenue is generated outside of the US.
You just proved my point.
> 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.
This is just not true. Especially for frontend development. But I've compared them very recently one to one and Opus wins every time.
Some people have been saying that 5.5 is on par with Fable and it's just nonsense.
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. 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...
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.
I can't build workflows on something that can randomly be unavailable for over a week.
At this point the future availability of Anthropic models outside the US is very unclear.
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.
Or its to stop industrialized distilation efforts?
I would suprised if admin doesn't want american companies and their employees to not be over competitive with outside companies.
But I do see them wanting a lever to prevent international rivals from having it.
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...
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).
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.
I had immense trouble buying api quota as a startup with a brex card and a C corp.
>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/
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.
From that page:
> At this time, retries are not supported. You can continue using OpenAI’s platform with your existing access.
That's ridiculous, especially as their list of reasons that verifications can fail include "There was a technical issue during submission".
I didn't know this. Looks like I dodged a bullet - being totally blind meant the chance of issues was high but luckily it worked. It triggered the id check while trying to get computer use to work for an installer running as admin on windows. Actual reverse engineering I got it to do in the past didn't trigger it.
Looks like they don't want unlucky people on their platform.
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.
GLM-5.2 has been very good
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.
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/
> they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
They could have vibe-coded their own verification system that uses DC APIs. It shouldn't take long, assuming that Anthropic still has access to Fable. /s
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.
> they won’t let you retry
Why would they care about _you_ when they have just a bit short of a billion users and they are up for a huge IPO? Of course they won't even bother implementing a retry.
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.
> OpenAI also has this kind of check.
Indeed, that's what motivated me to get an OpenRouter account!
As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...
what did you do to trigger a verification process?
It's frustrating that I can't find docs that even pretend to answer this question. Maybe it's my fault, maybe I overlooked it? I hope so.
To me, without documented use cases where you might/likely/certainly trigger identity verification, how can I properly limit my curiosity as someone who will gladly stay on the safe side for SOTA cloud model use? I'll happily stay away from these topics if I'm informed on what they are, even if the docs are vague.
Does anyone have insight into the answer to this? What API calls? What user behavior? What topics should I let go unanswered (or converse about with local LLMs) if I want to avoid losing access to the tooling?
The thought that they don't/won't publish this document should scare everyone. That leads to "because I said so" service refusal that is a very slippery slope.
I do understand that all businesses are allowed to refuse service to me in the USA, from food trucks to AWS, and that's fine with me. But at least tell me your rules and extra verification trigger criteria so I have a chance of not using your service in a way that concerns you.
They require verification to access the more capable models through their API. It's not required for "consumer" usage, which also includes things like the Codex CLI authenticated via oAuth.
Yes it is, they will trigger it over security related questions.
It can trigger it's self, when it decides it needs to try lots of different options to get clicks into an installer running as admin. There's basically nothing you can do to prevent it.
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.
> 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.
It demonstrates that:
1. Anthropic certainly has the ability.
2. They’re willing to use it silently.
And this thread is about OpenAI.
> 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.
There's no difference between shadowban and moderation, shadowban is a moderation tool.
Shadowban and community-driven moderation are different poles. Former is a tool of shallow narcisses, latter is the best moderation strategy possible in the clearnet. Come on, commenter.
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 about that.
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.
It doesn't say that your posts and comments are invisible - they just are.
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
It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.
It just has to chill your speech. It doesn't have to not mess up your life, as long as it chills your speech.
AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.
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.
How do they get the customer support number to that celebrity?
E.G> when Taylor Swift wants to call Apple right now, how would she know what number to call?
Incidentally, https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-...
I presume you get connected somehow when opening up a high-value account at a participating bank. If that account has some sort of concierge service, I presume that’s how special numbers for other companies might be distributed.
Pope Leo is not that rich, and had lived outside the US for many years (he came up in the church hierarchy of Latin America), so it’s not that surprising that he ran into this situation.
Link: 403 Not Allowed
Of course not, that's why I fail verification as them. If I had their passport I'd pass verification as them.
You’re misunderstanding the process.
It goes something like this (it varies by country / citizenship): first you upload a picture of your ID, then you use your phone to take a video of your face, then the two are matched. A failure is when the uploaded ID doesn’t match your face.
You can’t get to the part where they don’t match without uploading a picture of their ID. If you don’t have their ID, then you can’t fail to match. If you fake the ID, then when they come to upload their own ID, their ID won’t match your fake ID and they won’t be blocked.
>Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
You do not need real documents if your goal is to get the person locked out by using fake documents.
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or you can scan you retina using sam altmans device and get access immediately /s
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Control over... my government ID? I understand why someone might oppose this on systemic grounds if they don't believe that frontier models have dangerous capabilities, but I don't understand what the personal risk to me of ID verification is supposed to be. Unlike Discord, Anthropic has my credit card info, so they already know who I am.
For one you have to send your info to Persona, who will no doubt at some point start abusing the info they have on you.
If they don't start doing it immediately that is...
If you are comfortable with your ID scans sitting who knows where then I guess you are their target. Real fun starts when you identity gets stolen tho.
I'm not comfortable with it, but I've already had to verify my ID in the past to people I trust substantially less to handle the images securely. I can understand why someone who's never previously generated a digital photo of their ID might be more worried.
Why did you provide an ID to use an LLM... You're a mark
This is downvoted unfairly - "this guys fucks" :-) Indeed you attracted attention.
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.
> Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers.
The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1].
Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC.
> not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc
If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet.
[1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically
> 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.
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.
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
That's nonsense. You might not be able to afford to enter the market but that's not at all the same as a physical constraint capping the number of competitors.
You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies
If I want to service 1234 sesame st from my physical location with power lines there are a very limited number of routes I can take. The limited physical space quickly becomes crowded, duplicate physical infrastructure of that nature is highly inefficient, and there's a (completely pointless) negative impact on society to accommodate the constant installation and servicing.
Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".
> 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.
> AI companies are frankly far more limited.
I'd counter the exact opposite. You can purchase GPUs on the open market, they're just expensive. You can install the GPUs anywhere in the world, it doesn't need to be a particular street or a particular house. Suitable land and infrastructure for a large factory is similarly scarce and expensive and might need to be built out at great time and expense but that doesn't make heavy industry a natural monopoly.
Sure, there's currently a supply crunch for a lot of this stuff (ex gas turbines) but temporarily bad market conditions doesn't make something a natural monopoly either.
Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.
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
Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.
> 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.
what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?
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.
ISPs are legally protected. AI companies are not.
Why aren't we talking about bank neutrality?
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
This page has been up since April: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...
I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.
You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.
The identity verification support page says 'updated this week' but that is just an update to the appeals process. https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/
There was, however, also a change to the privacy policy, effective July 8, 2026. See https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o... It now says:
"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."
The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.
An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858
Anthropic’s -updated- privacy policy allows age and identity checks for Claude consumer users starting July 8th.
Incorrect. The policy already allowed age and identity checks. You can find cases of people being flagged for ID checks across social media like Reddit, or even in this thread on Hacker News. This is not new.
The updates were for the appeals process.
Anyone can just go to the updated privacy page and see you're being dishonest
https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o...
At least I (living in the EU) received an email at work on the 18th that had this section under "What has changed":
2. Verification Data. As part of our efforts to ensure the security of our services, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. We have described what information we collect and how we collect it.
Thanks. I went looking for how to actually verify myself as I would love to get access to Fable again. This post confirmed it, it's not relate to Fable at all and has been around. Thanks.
Did anthropic bar the use of any of their models behind an ID process back in April?
The answer seems to be yes [0]. Although I think it's important to state The Web Archive link proves that the recent Fable banning was not the catalyst for the page being linked.
Will Fable be back behind an ID verification step? I wouldn't be shocked if that happened. However, this specific support page and the ID veridiction process is not new. It is currently enforce.
It appears (but I can't be certain and don't think it's in bad faith) that many people are under the assumption that this is a result of the Fable banning. As a datapoint, I did some form of KYC verification to use OpenAI's cybersecurity platform a few weeks ago.
To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_iv...
Edit: truthbe above pointed out there was a privacy policy change.
nice to know it!!!
Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching
https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund
Can't get a refund if you're not a new subscriber.
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Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.
Notably, though, Persona does not have access to your Claude interactions, other than your signup/verification date. They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.
> They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure, but it won’t be correlated to your chats and projects, unless Anthropic is doing things that would make their counsel have heart attacks.
And if they do, they'll apologize with a blog post.
Maybe I’m entirely uncreative here, but if all they have is identity data and the implied data of having triggered a verification event, it feels like at best anything trained on this is really sketchy and could lead to some really messed up analysis. Like “we determined brown people trigger perform Claude queries that trigger identify verification at a rate 70% higher than white people”.
They would have access to IDs and whatever photos or real time video/audio is requires to verify. That's a big step towards building quite a large dataset for ID systems used for surveillance, for example.
There's also always the risk of not knowing who gets those documents later. The Dutch didn't think much of keeping detailed records including religious affiliation until the Nazis rolled into town.
LLM use is obviously much less politically charged today than religion was then (or ever), but that can always change, especially when an administration has already attacked said LLM provider as being something along the lines of a dangerous enemy of the state.
…and when they inevitably leak your government name with your facial biometrics? You can change your cc number and your phone number and your address. Your facial geometry, not so much.
> They’ll train on your uploaded docs and photos, to be sure
Or they won't. They're not Facebook.
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.
> a bit surprising and problematic
Not it's not. Evil companies like to do business together.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
May I remind you to download GLM 5.2 weights for just in case?
What new requirement? The linked page is months old.
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.
> and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).
They’ve had this process in place for a long time.
This page is not new or recent. Someone just found it and submitted it again. It’s been discussed on HN months ago if you want to go look.
Of course you don't like it. Which is why it is being spread around, even though it has nothing to do with Fable.
Not quite - this page has been there and saying this since April, so ~3 months ago.
Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.
In my case, the ethical AI theatre fell apart as soon as I read about their first military contracts, specifically with the US government.
Their ethos is boiled down to ”we’ll do everything to stop AI from killing us all! However, on the path to AI world domination, we don’t mind helping with killing people here and there :)”
Agreed, this is crazy, and is exactly why the administration did what it did. However, every frontier model will require this within months.
You're right. I want to say that openai is a viable alternative, but they're even less trustworthy.
It might be time for me to start looking into Chinese models or purchasing hardware for local llms, even if the cost amounts to 5-10k.
For 15k you could run the best open source models (that would require 200k in hardware to run) 24/7 at 50 tps for like 5 years straight.
Im really not sure why anyone would spend 15k to run local llms. The models you'll be able to run (70b) param models will be incredibly underwhelming.
> For 15k you could run the best open source models (that would require 200k in hardware to run) 24/7 at 50 tps for like 5 years straight.
Is this assuming no price increase and no throttling ?
I canceled when they first labeled as a supply chain risk. Switched to codex and neverlooked back. This company will be more evil then Google at the end.
OpenAI had the the same restrictions. Also required you to verify via Persona. I complained and at some point the restrictions were removed. Not sure if because of my complaining or if someone in our org actually verified.
https://imgur.com/ugXQ6Eb
Interesting. Never knew about this and thats never happened to me. But good to know.
Do you believe OpenAI won’t face the same troubles?
Thats a good question and I'm not sure. So far I am not aware of these same sort of issues facing OpenAI.
On a side note I have been playing around with local LLM and while it works, the speed is the bottle neck for me.
So... do you know why they were labeled that way?
Codex was bought by Musk a few days back.
You’re thinking of Cursor, I’m sure……
Codex is a product of OpenAI.
Yes, my bad.
and.. how is codex any better?
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"
> It's about covering their arse before reopening Fable 5
This help page has been there for a long time. Long before Fable was announced.
Their ID process isn’t new.
They might use it in the future to gate access to Fable if they can conclude that it’s sufficient to comply with the regulation, but the fact that they had this process in place already and they’re not using it for the Fable situation suggests there’s more to it.
Ha that's a good point I didn't realise the process was pre-dating the whole fable 5 story
Persona isn’t just an id upload. It’s also face scan by video.
So a fake ID but using your face?
How would they know? Does the US government expose their database to private businesses? I always wondered how these things work.
I normally run away from these ID checks. It’s just a matter of time until lone of these databases with everyone passports and videos get hacked. And vibe coding only makes it more likely.
I don’t care how good Claude is, it’s not good enough for that kind of risk.
Surprised there isn't a "Fake Face" market like a mannequin face delivered to your door.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
The latest ones make you smile, shut eyes / wink, look up, down, etc. plus for Apple they use the lidar and the IR camera for heat.
Not everyone has a device that can use lidar to map the face so it can’t be a requirement.
Kids have been defeating these smile and close your eyes things using photo mode in video games to control a character to perform the actions.
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.
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.
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)
Many of the people that talk about the “massive dragnet swirling around” are posting all their details to social media and checking in on their Ring cameras, and they’re also volunteering for the persona uploads.
Make sure you write it fully qualified:
Flock (YC S17)
Flock is a Y Combinator company.
Not just the government! techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/texas-government-data-breach-allowed-hackers-to-steal-3-million-drivers-licenses-and-passports/
> 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 also force tap access to the data
also it's not protected by the 4th amendment like an actual diary would, right? it's bullshit
> 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.
There is no way for Anthropic to move and remain competitive and useful. Their staff are (primarily) in the US. Thousands of people with mortgages, marriages, kids in school, recurring medical appointments with their trusted providers, people who speak only English. This idea that US companies could just hop jurisdictions because the state turned against them and their customers is an insane one.
> I'll pick my poison thanks and choose Chinese surveillance.
Assuming they won’t trade or sell it back to the US or whoever?
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.
Seems to work pretty well at keeping people from playing around with anthrax and fully automatic weapons.
Dunno about anthrax, but fully automated weapons are really easy to come by.
> especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism
This is what I don’t really get about the AI discourse… I don’t have any reason to think this is all a veneer over capitalism. We don’t know what goes on in their head but the track record of the cofounders of Anthropic is quite honest so it feels like a conspiracy theory to suggest they are purposefully getting themselves nationalized when the simplest answer is that there is real documented concern on AI safety risk
Just pay the bribes already.
> DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts
I'm rooting for China here, feels strange but well
>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 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.
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
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.
That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.
Subpoena by ID, nice and easy
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).
This is the next "drink verification can".
TIL verification can was invented and today's gaming state was predicted 13years ago
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.
Fortunately the 2nd Amendment exists.
And allows banning fully automatic weapons and licensing.
How do I legally own fully automatic weapons in the US, then?
The gov chooses to allow you too. However, since Heller, the Supreme Court has made clear, that is not a right.
In the US, guns are apparently safer than Anthropic AI models :)
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.
> 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)
>Verification data stays between you, Persona
The company that already had a data breach incident & has ties to palantir. Also used by OpenAI to ensure you can't escape it.
Now we just need to tie this in with Sam's eyeball scanning tech for maximum dystopia vibes
Persona is also a core provider in jurisdications implementing ID laws for social media and other web services.
Considering the ties to Palantir and America's mass surveillance apparatus, one could even argue that a primary goal of the admin could be to use the USA's current AI lead to accelerate the adoption of web ID laws, and global push to deanonymize all web traffic.
I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.
Hopefully you work for a competitor.
I actually don't.
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.
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...
Don't worry, they take security and privacy very seriously and have reviewed and updated their procedures to ensure your data is only shared with trusted partners.
So like the 10,000th breach where we still can’t find anyone suffering any sort of actual harm?
Seems like the old Linux FUD to me.
This page has existed since way before the current Fable controversy.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858
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?
Deepseek v4 pro or GLM 5.2 might be a good start. Bijan Bowen from youtube makes some excellent LLM reviews, I'll be watching even more intently from now on. All I really need is a model which is as good as Opus 4.5 was, so this transition should be fine. Thinking of switching too?
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.
It probably is. But I don't trust personas funders (and the US gov, btw) to only use this data in this regard.
Well, if it's (at the moment) only for verifying US citizenship for access to Fable then giving them your non-US ID won't do anything for you.
There are dozens of us!
r/USdefaultism :)
This isn't reddit that doesn't work...
I'm not from the US. And given the current behaviour of said country, I don't want to hand them the capability to connect my AI chats with my identity (yes, I know that they quite probably can do that at will already - but I do not need to hand it over on a silver plate)
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.
What do you mean? I doubt a person can ask for the deletion of their tax records.
So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM. Maybe a political candidate for the opposing party has something embarrassing there for example.
> So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM
This should definitely be a concern for any Claude user, especially given the open corruption of the current US administration.
If that alone doesn't concern you, everyone should also remember that Anthropic has accidentally released their own source code multiple times at this point.
Why should anyone believe they are going to handle your personal data with any more care than their own?
Isnt your account linked to your bank card anyway? The problem is storing the chat logs.
That makes the need for id verification even worse. They already know who is paying
They dont know whether they are a US citizen. Or rather cant defensibly prove it.
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.
I am reminded of the time Discords support desk was compromised where hackers had access to the data of anyone who ever had to give their support channels their ID. Are we sure we trust this third party to not be compromised? Is Anthropic allowing non-US citizens access to this data? Are they in countries where they could be bribed over access to this data much like in Discords case?
I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.
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.
Restricting access to US-only when the training dataset is from data of people around the world and data centers are not all US-only is something that's making me consider not supporting Anthropic.
> 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?
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’?
$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.
>$15k or $50k is pretty cheap all things considered
This website is so out of touch with reality.
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
glm-5.2 is available for $20/month on ollama.com and is IMHO more functional than the $200/month claude max subscription. you can even use the same claude harness [0]. You get about 20x more token usage at 10x less the price.
[0] https://ollama.com/library/glm-5.2
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.
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.
> Net result:
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
I feel like you missed the point pretty aggressively here if you're trying to claim waymo's existence in any way justifies burning roughly the GDP of Luxembourg on R&D. This should be a fairly alarming indicator of how utterly divorced the tech industry is from any kind of real world outcomes and just one of countless examples of tech industry hype resulting in embarrassingly miniscule returns when actual results are considered.
The cars exist, and they drive themselves. In the real world. Here's the latest city list:
San Francisco Bay Area, CA Los Angeles, CA Metro Phoenix, AZ Miami, FL Orlando, FL Dallas, TX Houston, TX San Antonio, TX Nashville, TN
I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?
pinches nose in frustration Yeah and they fled the Atlanta metro area because it rained. The point (the actual point here) isn't to relitigate Waymo's arc of existence. I merely hold them up as one of countless examples of the market's apparent disinterest in examining basically any of the tech industry's claims vs reality and how this leads to deeply perverse outcomes that absolutely would not be tolerated from any other industry segment. I'm guessing I'd get less pushback if I'd instead mentioned techbros attempts to reinvent trains badly from first principles being a smoke screen to sabotage mass transit projects, or pretty much anything involving social media or computers in classrooms.
While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
"objectively revolutionary"
That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
Yes exactly! The last time this happened we called it the industrial revolution and it put a lot of junior farmland developers out of jobs.
I feel like comparisons with the industrial revolution are reductionist in dangerous ways. The industrial revolution first shifted and then increased overall demand for labor. This made the labor movement possible and eventually ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the working classes. AI (by it's own marketing claims) is poised to vastly reduce demand for traditional labor without creating any new demand to replace it. Given the deeply interconnected nature of the modern economy it's not hard to imagine this proposed reduction in labor demand collapsing the economy in ways that fucking with interest rates and printing money don't fix.
I'm really struggling to get a handle on your position here. You appear to be arguing the worst positions from both sides of the debate around AI at the same time. If you're claiming the future is here and it is deeply stupid then we're in violent agreement.
Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
Curl is one of the most audited code bases, so that's not surprising.
Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.
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.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
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.
> 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.
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.
Except its like completely useless and insane from security standpoint. Any bad actor will just pay $50 to a meth junkie to register and verify account.
Fortunatelly its all just secuiry theatre so no one cares.
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.
Switch to open models and restore your sanity. GLM 5.2 is only slightly behind. Paying money but living in fear regardless is silly.
Anthropic is really on a tricky path here. When you have had runaway success due to a hit it is easy to believe that it is the natural way of things. However, that happened due to unique convergence of tech paradigm shift, the competitive landscape, and how they were positioned to capture that value through claude code.
They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'. While it's an admirable internal quality for the company to have, their treatment of their user base (developers, users) has been bordering on indifference and their stance bordering on arrogance.
As competition heats up, there is a very real chance of them shooting themselves in the foot with friction such as this (to be fair not completely in their control but also they had their share of responsibility that led to this)
> They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'.
...I don't think this is, like, a choice available to Anthropic. Their idea of AI safety—in the very specific "an unaligned AI could kill everyone" sense—is Anthropic's entire reason for existence. It's how they've attracted AI researchers, which in turn is probably why they have the best models right now. (I really do think they have the best models, although I can't prove it because LLM benchmarks don't work. They're certainly very good.)
I have no idea what the top executives truly believe, but regardless of whether their messaging is sincere, it's likely for their employees as much as the rest of us.
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.
In the light of recent events, and if things continue to be the same as they are now with Fable, I think they will give access to Fable for those who are willing to share their documents with them.
But that's obviously just a speculation.
Prepaid credit cards with cash would not be linked to your identity.
Well… maybe the real thing isn’t the headline thing?
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
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?
Yes, those tools are to collect a real-time selfie and photo of your government-issued ID, store it insecurely, feed it into some other 3rd-party networks to profile you, and share with their trusted partners for reasons.
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.
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.
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...
I love how it will always be "Wise, previously TransferWise".
Bank with technofeudalists, win stupid prizes.
Over a £100k with a techbro fintech that isn't even a bank. My friend, you're a gambler!
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" it noted my preference in its /insights.
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...
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.
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?
MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB RAM + oMLX|LM Studio|Llama.cpp|etc. + Opencode|etc. + Models from DeepSeek|Qwen|Google. There are alternatives to centralized, cloud-based LLMs!
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.
> Persona is a third party identity verification company backed by Peter Thiel. The announcement comes months after Discord dropped Persona as an age verification vendor following significant user backlash and a reported data exposure incident in February 2026.
So, in the end, it was just another mass ID grab by Persona? This also doesn't look like how EAR stuffs were handled.
Currently going through all my claude web chats and building conversation logs and downloading all my files as well as using the export function. Getting throttled pretty hard now. I have a max20 plan and will be canceling it at the end of my billing cycle. What disappointing news! I was all in until this identity verification requirement. I guess I will have to try out deepseek now.
Yeah that'll be a pass for me.
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.
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.
While this seems related to recent events, this page has been there for months. They have used it when they think an account is underage.
We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633
Anthropic: we don’t want to be used for mass surveillance
Also Anthropic:
They all have everyone ID's through payments already..
Yes, it’s the biometrics they’re after.
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.
They don't have nationality, I guess? Just card issuer origin and payment origin.
Why use Persona? Most countries have real services for identifying users. Same services that are used when you pay online or do your taxes. At the end it does not really matter I guess. American cloud services are compromised and can no longer be trusted.
No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.
Never been a better time to use local models.
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.
I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D
> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes
I'm always curious about these stipulations. Its not like Anthropic would have a choice here what the legal demands are, but I don't see a commitment to make all requests as public as they legally can.
If the government were to say export controls mean you must share every identity verification attempt with us, it may be a long drawn out battle if Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.
Oh, yes, they’ll only have my passport and selfie. I’m sure they couldn’t do anything with those.
Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.
How is it always the same company doing the verification too?
How is it going to work for corporate customers. What if one us employee writes claude output into a ticket, can that be read by a non us citizen employee? What about paraphrased?
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.
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.
Interestingly Persona offers an attribution process (“verified” or “not verified”) and no data is held. Why does Anthropic want a selfie?
Makes one ponder how there really is no moat. If this rolls out as implied, it is immediately easy to switch providers, and I will.
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.
What validation databases and where can you get access to them?
I don’t really know, and I am guessing it varies from country to country anyway.
> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.
As said - YOU have become their product. I call it slavery.
Anyone still wondering who really is pushing for mandatory age sniffing on computers? We are seeing the whole picture slowly now. AI is a huge scam - it is all against humans.
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.
5. Chinese providers license their models to western partners, with the Chinese running training and the westerners running inference.
It's what most western companies have to do when they want to operate in China anyway, no reason why we couldn't have a reverse system.
I hope you're right.
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.
Not gonna happen. I'll just just more of the Chinese models then. Digital I'd is a clear no from me.
> 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.
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.
If models start only being available for a certain class of citizens of x,y,z countries, there will be "smart hackers" selling out their token usage for twice the price or something (a litteral black market for tokens).
I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock
> 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.
The ID verification is also being used to enforce Claude's 18+ age restriction.
It seems there is no way for a high school student to use Claude for any purpose, including as part of a supervised project or class.
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.
Tom Sawyer at one point was painting a fence and trying to get people to help him and nobody would. Until he started saying "Oh I don't know, I'm not sure if I can let you help out".
(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.)
This just follows the usual tech trend that when something gets finally good enough, an unskippable package deal appears as the only way to use it.
YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.
So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.
I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?
Not much pen testing you can do if they decide to cut you off. E.g on Linkedin it only works with NFC-enabled passports so it cryprographically signed by issuer country.
Though considering how many americans dont have passports its will be like shooting themself in a foot.
What about buying API access through intermediaries like OpenRouter? Also, will the people passing verification be added to a openaiwatchlist DB?
At the very least I would expect them to support eID for everyone who can and doesn't want their 3rd party. Also much better than take a video of plastic card.
Hold on a second... didn't you literally hand over a verified phone number when you signed up? Please tell me you used a burner SIM for that!
Of course, how else would I cycle between free accounts when my usage limit is up
Depending on countries, there is no such thing as a burner SIM card.
Why is the world going in this direction? I don’t want to give my biometric data to everyone. I can’t change it if it gets breached or sold on…
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.
> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.
What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.
AI is all about information and therefore about speech. If you need to identify yourself to access information or ask questions, it undermines freedom. Anthropic is on the wrong side of history.
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.
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
On the bright side maybe less people will use AI as a therapist if every thought they dump into it is now associated to their ID and home address
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
Come on guys, just give your ID, passport data and photo (since it scans NFC) to Persona. After all Peter Thiel is the most trustworthy supplier of tech in US used to kill people using drones with AI including face recognition.
Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?
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.
Not defending this, and it's far from ideal, but also credit card details were already pretty much confirming identities already.
Time to move to locally hosted open source models - only if the thinking models could perform well locally
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.
I wonder how good AI now is at generating plausible-looking identity documents, photos, and videos of a virtual identity...
Shut up and take my money. Joeks aside, no ID for you. My name is on my bank card and my bank has KYCed me already.
Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.
Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.
Alright, I'm off Claude.
That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.
How could they do that ?
I want Anthropic to be the good guys.
I think Anthropic should explain why they're doing this particular partnership.
Prepare for hard landing in 3... 2... 1...
So apparently the UK and Europe are sleepwalking into an identity collection en masse by the state and yet…
The coding capabilities they offer, are their own.
This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.
We knew that from the start.
Didnt claude recently post its entire codebase online?
Seems like it upgraded to doxxing its entire userbase.
How does it work in business settings? Is your employer going to send your ID information to Claude?
This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after
I cancelled my claude pro a couple weeks back. Had some doubts over it, but not anymore
this will finally kickstart the self hosted revolution in full force. Because I for sure af ain't giving my id to some AI company and have them profile me into oblivion.
Did everyone forget that you have to do this for OpenAI since GPT-4?
I'm curious how multiple accounts come into play here. Does anyone know?
Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI.
"Hey, maybe social media shouldn't be made available to children. Let's add some age checks maybe?" "Reee noo that's invasion of privacy it's a slippery slope"
"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"
Who says that's perfectly reasonable? The first thing to ask any new LLM is how do you make cocaine, to figure out how nerfed it is.
`Persona is contractually limited in how they can use your data: only to provide and support verification and to improve their ability to prevent fraud.`
Right.... So training a better facial recognition model improves their ability to prevent fraud?
Sure. And also exchanging the data (sharing it) with partners:
> Persona ... cross-references your information against trusted third-party databases.
One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".
Ridiculous theatre.
I bet z.ai doesn’t even respond to US subpoenas
I will never ever give Persona my ID.
i think claude is going to become the AI of the US government/public sector. if it isn't already
I'm glad I don't use Claude.
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).
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!
So they will be able to know how each person thinks, block capabilities they want to block, boycott what they want to boycott, and influence perspective on reality.
Fortunately they are Anthropic and so as the name tells, they will care about humans. And so we can trust them they won't try to push agendas that require constant propaganda to be accepted, since it never happened before right?
De platforming, debanking, misinformation, hate speech, anyone?
>> We only use your verification data to confirm who you are and not for any other purposes.
We use "who you are" mainly for banning you from the system for life, so you'll never be able to AI program again and will have to leave the industry because some arbitrary decision by some grunt at Anthropic decided you were in breach of something, with no path for review or justice.
See, it's all fine!
This is a big win for LLMs from China and to a much lesser extent from Europe.
I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.
Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.
No I will not
Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.
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
It's annoying but ok in general to verify age of your users. The problem for me is mainly how and what vendor they use. They picked the worst possibilities.
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?
Now the question is, are people addicted enough already to do whatever it takes to continue getting the hit?
Person is terrible. The U.S. itself should provide this service.
Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id
all the paid spies in the comments being like... 'f this is bad for the U.S., the U.S. is doing something terrible'
> How your data is protected
It's not
lol, absolutely not.
ffs do it and give me fable.
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!)
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Why would you need to do so?
I mean, the easiest starting step would be: Identity Verification via the methods Discord switched to after realizing Persona was horrible.
Much more ideally, some sort of government-ran zero-proof service where Anthropic can confirm solely that you are a valid US Citizen without Anthropic gaining enough PII to link my account to a particular legal identity (these already exist)
Of course, if your adversary can't just buy a dozen US Citizens, they're not really much of a threat to begin with... (there are lots of ways to buy people: explicit bribes, people of questionable loyalty, scam them, or just hack into a dormant account with an annual subscription)
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.
This particular IDV flow will be used with consumer Claude web accounts only.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619003
Doesn't say anything about age.
It does at the end of the article, under 18 will be banned
How does a dark lord born before the beginning of time verify its age?
My email address in Claude contains my full name. I pay it with a bank card and the bank already verified my full identity.
Realistically this is a "who cares" for me. It represents very little if any incremental privacy loss.
The only question left is which countries will have access or if it will be USA only.
I understand how this can be incredibly frustrating to non-US users or people who would like to remain anonymous. But from an enforcement perspective makes sense. If someone is able to leverage a jail break to break into a classified system, the government needs to easily be able to track down who that person is.
You can make that silly argument to justify almost any government overreach
They already have an identity based on payment method…
This is a good thing:
A. This brings responsibilities on using these super powerful models like fable and mythos.
B. Distillation attacks can be avoided as someone who does it can be perma banned
C. Brings value to having an American passport, AI benefits all the world equally but it's built on American talent and capital. There should be some value to people who are not shareholders.