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I'm imagining a future where a bunch of bizarre laws interact oddly (as they do), and now we've got websites with unnecessary nudity pasted in the corner.

"Oh, those? Those are just compliance tits. Ignore those. It's just a thing that came a few years after we finally got rid of the cookie banners. The companies wanted certain protections awarded only to 18+ sites. But you can't just declare yourself an 18+ site, so some sites post the most minimal amount of imagery that constitutes erotic nudity. That's why Google's graphic for the past few months has just been that one with the two dots in the middle of the o's."

Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.

This seems like a lazy snipe. They clearly state that they receive only an age verification result and none of the personal data. It would take collusion from both sides to silently enable transfer of user data while publicly stating that they don't.

I have used these KYC services before. There is the option to get access to all user data - but unless there is evidence to the contrary, we have to take their word for it, for now.

More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1,2] and similar legislation. These create extra steps that a service has to go through before releasing a new model that minors can interact with and exposes them to prosecution if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot. It's safer for Anthropic to just exclude minors -- and they're unlikely to be paying customers anyway.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

[2] https://sd18.senate.ca.gov/news/governor-newsom-signs-adams-...

Given this feature seems to be premised off guessing a user’s age based on their inputs, and a common use case for Claude it uploading personal legal and tax documents to have Claude explain them to you, I am guessing Anthropic is not hurting for data about their customers.

Seems more likely this is designed to stave off similar laws /regulations to what the social media platforms are now being hit with, and moving liability from Anthropic to parents. If dad lets kid use his Claude account for a school project, and Claude ends up telling the kid to hurt himself, it’s now dad’s fault.

From TFA: Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance. Your selfie, document images, and any personal data are deleted by Yoti as soon as your age is checked. Anthropic never sees your ID or image; we receive only a pass/fail result and do not process or store any personal data from the verification.

Age verification is the silver bullet for personal data collection. Open internet enthusiasts hate this one simple trick!

>Damn, we hardly know who our users are

No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.

And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.

> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

I doubt that this statement is true.

I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.

Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.

More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.

You always take the written policy win over thoughtful technical controls. Way easier for the whole org.

This is the same thought process behind 2fa. (And to externalize Google’s spam problem).

I think they are combating distillation and token resellers (there's a nonzero overlap)

I can tell you don't know anyone at Anthropic.

I don't think "we hardly know who our users are" is a problem any AI company is having lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1v6mgbs/comment/o...

What do you think is written on my credit card and my bill from Anthropic?

Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so.

What would be gained with government id that would make this worthwhile? If people are already putting all their personal details into the LLM as well as all their work, do they really need id to know who someone is? Seems more likely they just want to avoid liability from all the child suicides?

Yes, it must be a sinister act of manipulation and not what it appears to be on the tin.

> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :)

Before writing this did you read the part where it says you don’t even need ID?

You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.

It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.

It’s OK to age gate some services. Its not all a conspiracy to steal your data.

Claude Executive: Damn, schools are moving to teach the ill effects of our fake AI. How can we stop that?

Claude Product Manager: Give me 2sec...

> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever

The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.

Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.

For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.

none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.

This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.

Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.

This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.

That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.

For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.

Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.

I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.

This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:

* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.

* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.

(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.

If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.

We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.

And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)

I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.

Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.

I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.

It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.

This is the way!

They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.

> Accepted age verification methods

> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:

> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.

> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.

> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.

Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either

Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.

> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.

You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.

You get that, right? Right?

"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.

Yeah, I don't understand why the title does not say (2024).

If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.

The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o

> Is AI bad for mental health?

I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.

> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?

It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.

I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a class the primary purpose isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.

I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.

I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.

Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.

> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...

It might not be about banning minors and just an excuse to get government ID / biometric face scan.

Would you believe it is all about the over 18s?

Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.

Abt protecting minors:

19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.

Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.

Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.

Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.

...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.

(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.

Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.

> Is AI bad for mental health?

Well, just look at the effect on the authors of the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic.

Dude, being able to run high quality models locally with cheap hardware can't some soon enough.

what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?

I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:

  1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever.  No newspapers.  No television.  No radio.  No internet.
  2. You're a child under the age of six.
  3. You're an LLM.

Is AI bad for mental health?

lol

If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?

No, capitalism must be fed.

What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.

I agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...

This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”

There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.

Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.

Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.

Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.

I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.

I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.

I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.

Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.

I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.

Apple verified me by the age of my account. Claude asked to use the age verification when I opened it on my iPad. Haven’t been asked for any other kind of age verification by Anthropic.

Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.

Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.

Doesn't this break if the child uses a VPN, or some other software to spoof? For this to really work Windows would have to lock down all HTTP, and really all networking, only allow approved software/browsers, etc. Is there a reason this wouldn't be the case?

The problem is that it would be a client side identity verification mechanism and won't work for websites.

As an example this would means that if this exists in iOS, everytime a safari loads a webpage it has to send this additional verification identifier as a header or a query param to the web server that serves the request and based on that the web server deny the request if the identifier is present (that means a minor is trying to access the web page).

But this client side identifier can easily be bypassed via a proxy that strips the identifier from the request because not matter it's configured in the OS of the device, ultimately request would just goes out as HTTP and that can be manipulated. That's why it has to be a server side verification of the age/identification.

California passed a law AB-1043 that requires every OS developer to add age verification on the OS level.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...

I want to go back to having an IQ test to use the Internet.

> There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device.

Anything like that should be configured by the parents. Your child is your responsibility. I shouldn't have to take a picture of my passport just because someone is a neglectful parent.

I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.

That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated

Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?

If you think about the history of abuse wrought upon the public by tech companies in regards to personal information, then the reaction really isn’t that surprising.

Are you really surprised that people are suspicious? Really?

Or the industry standard will change

Or they will use OpenAI, which allows guardians to complete age verification and enable work for kids age 13 to 17.

Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.

Good, the less capable they are, the more students will actually have to learn.

I think over time due the regulations like these younger generations in western countries like US/UK would fall far behind compared to the counterpart in India or China when it comes to AI fluency.

I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.

I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.

What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.

Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.

As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.

Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.

And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.

> ... at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality.

I'd not realised the ban covers child brains too. /i

Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3

That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?

Yes, I'm wondering why it's upvoted like this is something new today. What's going on?

300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting

> In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already.

It’s the case everywhere. The date in the article is May.

These links to the Claude help pages get submitted and upvoted on HN periodically. There is usually a big uproar when the ID verification page gets shared, even though that process has existed for a long time and most people haven’t triggered it.

The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.

Kids lack proper impulse control and sometimes make bad decisions if left unattended. It's preferable if we restrict certain dangerous actions from them.

Yes, LLMs can be dangerous for your own health if misused. Yes, I'd be furious if I was 14 and got my Claude access revoked.

As others have said in this thread, I'd add that this should primarily be the parents' responsibility since they know their child best.

How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?

Treating children and teenagers as the same group is out of control.

It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.

I used a similar (same?) service that claimed no data was uploaded and "all processing happens on-device"... I decided to record network packets with wireshark and found out the tool DID upload a significant amount of data (about 2 megabytes) through its lifetime. I wouldn't trust these tools farther than you can throw them.

Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.

Seems related but not exactly what was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633

Policy enforcement has been that if the bot guessed the user was a minor it interrupted communication.

ZKPs would defeat the purpose of age verification, the point being to track your activity online so governments can do precrime and make sure no group can ever use technology to organize and challenge existing power structures so this will never happen.

Should be a thing stores sell for $5.00 or whatever, show your ID (not scanned) get a code you can use to verify. This obviously has flaws, but the point of age verification isnt to protect kids, the world is ran by literal pedophiles.

and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.

Warsaw here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids connected to whatever social networks they want. The state will not be able to censor the internet for my kids.

The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.

The date on the help article is May 18, 2026.

It’s quite amazing that in a support doc for normies, they’re literally linking to https://developers.yoti.com/identity-verification/supported-... for supported IDs which opens with

  GET https://api.yoti.com/idverify/v1/supported-documents?includeNonLatin=true

What was the justification for using Persona in the first place, if this is so important to know and care about?

I think getting personal data collection out of the Thielverse is anything but a strange move

Sounds like irresponsible move: https://ppc.land/spain-fines-yoti-eu950-000-over-biometric-d...

At least they didn't switch to idscan.net /s

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...

That brings us back to requiring the user to present ID to the camera while doing a live-selfie, that would be a honest, belt-and-suspenders approach that's worth a look. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting.

The CoT isn't necessarily showing that it ran a classifier. The system prompt has:

> If Claude suspects it's talking with a minor, it keeps the conversation friendly, age-appropriate, and free of anything unsuitable for young people. Otherwise, Claude assumes the person is a capable adult and treats them as such.

No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.

Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.

Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.

Health.

The health of e.g. Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.

Since Epstein is gone, the ruling class have become obsessed with collecting photos of children and identifying devices they use. Strange that.

Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?

And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?

Magical like finding a house made of candy in the woods, or maybe more like that guy with the flute who solved the rat problem. Or maybe that guy selling magical beans?

Anyhow, you're right! kids love magic.

I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.

Yeah it’s out of control