Claude may require identity verification in some cases(support.claude.com) |
Claude may require identity verification in some cases(support.claude.com) |
Persona also might send your data to 17 different subprocessors (16 if you exclude Anthropic itself).
You reminded me of this submission from two months ago: I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245)
I legally couldn't verify because persona doesn't detect aadhaar card and their support system on twitter/mail whatever was incredibly bad so much so that it felt like copy-paste and I still haven't gotten the card. I have written about my experience too.
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/linkedin/ : (Title of this is) Linkedin's "final decision", restricting my account, making me feel unheard, Persona being Persona & the time I asked Linkedin support what 351/13 is to prove if they are human or not.
So now he's a Codex user. OpenAI and Google both have a minimum age of 13.
EDIT: I should note that Anthropic gave him a refund for the whole month that was underway, despite him being nearing the end of it. So good on them.
Can you expand on this? Your teenage son makes more money than you do professionally, by vibe coding video games?
Anthropic made the best models by hiring non-technical folks like philosophers to build the best training sets and evaluations. Now, it seems like their philosophers are telling people how they can and can't use their model.
I sense an opportunity for free tokens.
Ideas for prompts that reliably trigger the age check?
It is frequently said that programming directly is obsolete, and the skill you must have now is knowing how to operate agentic AIs.
Yet you aren't allowed to do this until you're 18.
So, developing software is now 18+ only?
And the answer to that question is:
"Hell no! We used the cheapest, shadiest company we could find for that. They'll process and sell all your data. Thank you for continuing to be a valued Anthropic customer!".
* preventing North Korea, China, Russian, Iran and etc. actors from accessing service. They absolutely use workarounds to access AI, e.g. I bet there are companies who are proxy between Anthropic and those countries.
I imagine there will be quite some false positives while identifying those.
[0] https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:6192f38e3094b...
- Repeated violations of our Usage Policy
- Account creation from an unsupported location
- Terms of Service violations
- Under-18 usage
For the user, sure. But for companies and governments? I'm pretty sure Person is quite trustworthy.
Why would you do this? If you can't write it yourself, you're just sabotaging your effort once the hallucinations are revealed. Secondly, a whistleblower is going to use a corporate LLM provider? Even without ID checks, that's an extremely uncompensated risk.
In other words: they want to create a private web and sniff-after-people system. Today the EU also introduced an app for age verification. They also constantly say how this is ... voluntary.
Well, I guess we all know the direction. Let's have a look at this in a few years, because there may be a few ... suspicions.
With regards to Claude the question is: WHY do they want to sniff off user data exactly?
The future has arrived, in which you are only allowed to program a computer in any meaningful way requires total identification and permission.
What a tragedy that the amazing capabilities of LLM assisted programming come with such disgusting and reprehensible requirements and impositions.
So they can ban you from some minor infringement of their usage policies and you'll never be allowed to program again.
"Mr Anderson, it has come to our attention that you have been programming computers under an assumed identity. As you are aware this is a felony under the computer fraud and hacking act and you will be sentenced to four years in jail and may never use a computer again.". Yes laugh it up.
> Your ID and selfie are collected and held by Persona, not on Anthropic's systems. Anthropic can access verification records through Persona's platform when needed—for example, to review an appeal—but we don't copy or store those images ourselves.
It's unacceptable that this data is persisted at all, let alone that it's persisted by Persona.
> 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. They're bound to protect it with industry-standard security controls and delete it in line with the retention limits we've set and applicable law.
It's good to hear that they're criminals. That means nothing for me though. Nothing.
> Why did my account get banned after verification?
This is bad. Why do they wait to ban until after they have your personal info? Venmo did the same thing to me: They didn't tell me I was banned until they had my ID. Absolutely despicable practice.
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Anthropic is one of my favorite AI companies because they get LLMs more right than anyone else I've seen. But unfortunately this also means they can be swindled by social manipulation in lieu of technical excellence; the same type of brain results in both, I've seen it.
Persona is a bout of sociopaths, and it shows: they're worming their way into everything despite the well-documented conspiracy. They're doing it out in the open with zero consequences.
I may consider showing my ID to a company I already have a business relationship with; given demonstrable legal obligations, contractual necessities, legitimate interests etc . Eg the standard GDPR list.
I do have an existing business relationship with Anthropic, so I might under some circumstances decide to show them my id. I don't have a business relationship with Persona though.
I understand the instinct: they want to insulate themselves from holding PII. Not the worst idea. I'm not happy with it being a third party though. Especially the third party in question.
Put this way: I sort of already trust Anthropic with some of my PII. And that's ... maybe not ok actually. But it's a single failure surface.
But that's definitely not the same thing as trusting Anthropic, AND Persona AND All Persona's partners AND their Partners ad infinitum.
And let's say Persona is actually ok; who knows, they might be? But it's still an extra surface; and if they share again, that's another extra surface again.
It's fairly common sense blast radius minimization. This is part of the actual theory behind GDPR.
"We already seem to accidentally be leaking some data through channel A" , doesn't mean it's a good idea to open channels B-Z as well. It means you might want to tighten down that channel A.
Logged into Claude. Cancelled my max sub. That was that. Now on to migration.
If someone is doing something deeply unethical with Claude, let's say they're using a clade of Claudes to launch cyberattacks, then doesn't Anthropic have fine grained telemetry, payment history, API usage / prompting / requests, and other details necessary to investigate? What does a government photo ID provide Anthropic that these data points don't?
At this point, people usually ask "what if they use stolen credit cards?" or are "state backed?" then well... if they're state backed / using stolen credit cards, then they're also capable of using stolen IDs or state-sponsored "legitimate" IDs.
It doesn't make much of a difference to organized crime / state backed assets. Or, Anthropic. But it makes A HUGE difference for entrepreneurs, founders, and just plain old consumers who use the service.
It's an asymmetric risk.
It's one thing for your credit card to leak, you can get a new one. It's harder for lower-tier / dumber criminals to socially engineer into your personal information for impersonation / ID theft with just a credit card number. But it becomes a lot easier with your scans of your ID.
Unless you're connected with an org of interest, have b/millions in crypto, most better organized groups / state actors won't usually (no guarantees) steal your identity. Identity theft is very much a SME operation in cybercrime.
So when Persona inevitably gets compromised and everyone's personal IDs inevitably gets leaked, the threat posed to entrepreneurs, founders and consumers is higher than the inverse.
I don't understand why Anthropic would expose themselves to the liability; when arguably they have all the tools baked right in.
I don't use their tool for writing. Perhaps it's ego, but I think I'm a better writer. But I shared the above text and asked Claude Opus 4.6 on Max thinking, "What would you say about the argument that the Anthropic has the best tool for threat prevention baked right in?"
Claude is the threat prevention. It's sitting between every user and every potential misuse, in real-time, at every interaction. It refuses harmful requests. It detects prompt injection. It flags dangerous patterns. Anthropic has built the most sophisticated content-aware security layer in history — and it operates at the interaction level, where misuse actually happens.
A JPEG of someone's driver's license sitting in a Persona database does exactly nothing at the moment someone tries to use Claude for harm. Claude's own refusal system does everything.
So the full argument stacks:
1. Credit cards already verify identity (bank KYC)
2. Anthropic's telemetry already detects misuse patterns better than any static document
3. The AI itself is the security layer — real-time, context-aware, at the exact point of interaction
4. Photo ID adds zero marginal security — while concentrating breach risk on users
Three layers of existing protection, all superior to a photo ID. The ID is the weakest link in the security model and the highest-risk data asset in the system. It's the only component that, when breached, harms the user more than the company.
You should write this up.
>I don't understand why Anthropic would expose themselves to the liability; when arguably they have all the tools baked right in.
What liability? When has a company ever faced any significant penalty for irresponsibly handling people's private data?
You can have a CC / Visa / MasterCard when you are under 18 years old, but you need to be 18 or older for Claude. That would be one reasons why CC does not work.
Or maybe they suspect you opened a second account after your first got banned for whatever reason. Like you said it's easy to get a new card.
Debit? Sure, some banks will issue them to 11-12 year olds. Credit? Apparently not.
On the scale of intelligence budgets this would be in the realm of petty cash.
So identity verification is basically a canary that your account is about to get banned, or is on the chopping block. At that point you're better off abandoning ship rather than handing over your ID.
I have zero obligation to detail the work my minor son does to random weird foot-stomping, entitled creeps on HN, and these bizarrely insecure demands by professional failures is...telling.
In this case I assume you're keying off of the other clown who, based upon absolutely nothing (but apparently their own professional failure), is certain it must be "cheating software".
How pathetic. If this is your lot in life, Jesus Christ find a different career. Maybe the trades or something.
Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard.
So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV)
edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)
You can quantize it of course, but if the idea is "as close to Sonnet as possible," then while quantized models are objectively more efficient they are sacrificing precision for it.
So next step is to up that speed, so we're at 4x $1300, Nvidia 5090s with 32 GB of VRAM each (128 GB), or $5,200 before RAM/CPU/etc. All of this additional cost to increase your tokens/second without lobotomizing the model. This still may not be enough.
I guess my point is: You see this conversation a LOT online. "Qwen3 can be near Sonnet!" but then when asked how, instead of giving you an answer for the true "near Sonnet" model per benchmarks, they suddenly start talking about a substantially inferior Qwen3 model that is cheap to run at home (e.g. 27B/30B quantized down to Q4/Q5).
The local models absolutely DO exist that are "near Sonnet." The hardware to actually run them is the bottleneck, and it is a HUGE financial/practical bottleneck. If you had a $10K all-in budget, it isn't actually insane for this class of model, and the sky really is the limit (again to reduce quantization and or increase tokens/second).
PS - And electricity costs are non-trivial for 4x 3090s or 4x 5090s.
If you ever want to answer this type of question yourself, you can look at the size of the model files. Loading a model usually uses an amount of RAM around the size it occupies on disk, plus a few gigabytes for the context window.
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is 120GB. Quantized to 4 bits it is ~70GB. You can run a 70GB model in 80GB of VRAM or 128GB of unified normal RAM.
Systems with that capability cost a small number of thousand USD to purchase new.
If you are willing to sacrifice some performance, you can take advantage of the model being a mixture-of-experts and use disk space to get by with less RAM/VRAM, but inference speed will suffer.
Gemma 4 31B Q6: 9tok/s, I'd say it is smarter than GPT-4o, but yeah it's slow. Good for coding.
Gemma 4 26B A4B Q4: 50tok/s. Feels faster than ChatGPT 5.4, but not as smart (as it reasons less). Good for general chatting and research.
Who says this?
This is genuine advice I’ve seen from high profile business types. We’re fucked in the sense our children will be made to be attention whores online.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is reported to perform slightly better than the model you mentioned.
It runs fine but non-optimal on a single 3090 with even 131072 tokens of context , and due to the hybrid attention architecture, the memory usage and compute scale rather less drastically than ctx^2. I've had friends with smaller cards still getting work out of it. Generation is at around 20 tokens/sec on that 3090 (without doing anything special yet) . You'll need enough DRAM to hold the bits of the model that don't fit. Nothing to write home about, but genuinely usable in a pinch or for tasks that don't need immediate interactivity.
It's the first local model that passes my personal kimbench usability benchmark at least. Just be aware that it is extremely verbose in thinking mode. Seems to be a qwen thing.
(edit: On rechecking my numbers; I now realize I can possibly optimize this a lot better)
- Qwen is near Sonnet 4.5!
- How do I run that?
- [Starts talking about something inferior that isn't near Sonnet 4.5].
It is this strange bait/switch discussion that happens over and over. Least of all because Sonnet has a 200K context window, and most of these ancdotes aren't for anywhere near that context size.
Only way to know if your own criteria are now matched -or not yet- is to test it for yourself with your own benchmark or what have you.
And it does show a promising direction going forward: usable (to some) local models becoming efficient enough to run on consumer hardware.
[1] released mid-2025
[2] take with salt - only tests personal usability
+ Note that some benchmarks do show Qwen3.5-35B-A3B matching Sonnet 4.5 (released later last year); but I treat those with the same skepticism you do , clearly ;)
That's unsurprising, seeing as inference for agentic coding is extremely context- and token-intensive compared to general chat. Especially if you want it to be fast enough for a real-time response, as opposed to just running coding tasks overnight in a batch and checking the results as they arrive. Maybe we should go back to viewing "coding" as a batch task, where you submit a "job" to be queued for the big iron and wait for the results.