This feels deeply problematic. I would much prefer, where asked via appropriate legal processes, Anthropic serve over user data to government officials, and potentially suspend access.
If programming requires LLM/AI then regulation by government is needed to stop this overreach, which has the primary goal of banning you permanently forever making sure you can never come back to programming, in the event some AI in their system decides you have done something “wrong”.
>the West was complaining about surveillance and scoring system of citizens in China
free speech, civil liberties, voting, are in China all well below the standards of the west. The criticism and complaints were completely warranted and are still true today, whereas your comment falsely implies there is some parity.
could your comment be repaired to be reasonable? why bother, just read the rest of this discussion where people are debating these controls without trying to exonerate China.
Well, the powers-that-be saw how a society that doesn't allow a lot of open criticism works in the form of China. The massive returns on investment, the near-permanent ruling class in the form of party cadres, etc. Then they decided they want that for themselves.
If you do business with totalitarian societies that aren't made to liberalize, you too will become a totalitarian society.
I should be worried about this, but Anthropic's products are a paid product. You can't use them without providing some identifying information, unless you're going out of your way to provide them inaccurate information.
I generally dislike services which require this level of identity verification but also, so far, those have mostly been freemium services and community tools. And I dislike gating those communities.
I'm sure I should have more of a problem with this.
More signal that the open-weight models should be our destiny as an industry.
These proprietary models are being used to usher in more surveillance and gatekeeping across the industry.
I have a home server that runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through llama.cpp with Open WebUI for the user facing interface.
My teen isn't super interested in AI, but whenever they do feel curious they have their own account they can use on our home network. As far as chatting goes local models are more than capable for handling standard chat questions, doing research, helping troubleshoot problems etc. In fact it was an agent powered by the same model that setup the open webui server and took care of all the account management features through my phone (using Hermes agent).
If you're building AI powered features and using sophisticated agent setups for coding for work, then it make sense to use SoTA from these providers. But I've been using local models increasingly for personal use and am starting to find them preferable (I run an uncensored, ephemeral model for my own use and it's an entirely different experience than anything you can pay for).
Still haven't cancelled my personal Anthropic subscription, but considering it soon.
I'm happy to give my identity to Anthropic and crush my competition with irrational fear about privacy and personal data. This is a serious competitive advantage and a moat.
More signal this won’t happen without some serious social unrest, not garden variety Jan 6 events… and the window is closing rapidly - when this tech gets sufficiently advanced there won’t be a place to hide.
They are not going to let open weights models with zero restrictions exist dude. They will be regulated like guns, or probably closer to nerve gas or enriched uranium.
That's fine, I already cancelled my subscription after they admitted to using PEFT to selectively and silently make their models dumber when working in certain technical fields.
Maybe that was petty, but I was already looking for alternatives after the obvious angling for increased regulation and suppression of local models. LLMs are software and I want to modify them and run them on hardware that I own.
This is their only option. Someone who is the head of security for a hospital IT department needs access to mythos, and some 17 year old with fraud convictions doesn't.
It's the same reason we require ID for alcohol and gun purchases. Obviously it isn't a perfect system, teens drink but good luck suggesting that 13 year old should be allowed to buy alcohol.
Hmm, is this a thing for enterprise accounts too? My employer has gone all-in on Claude, but if I get a pop-up that requires me to give my ugly mug to a literal cardinal enemy of the human race Peter Thiel, then I will have to seriously consider switching jobs, because I have some of them silly principles.
We’ve been in sort of a golden age where massive money is getting pulled in and consumers are getting a great deal. That’s not going to last, and surely surveillance and personal information are going to fit into the formula for success for these companies. It’s very similar to when Google was a brand new search engine.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 76.8 ms ] thread> This policy was published on June 8, 2026 with an effective date of July 8, 2026
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ucu6og/any_solut...
Seems like US wants to get ahead on this and be #1
Also Sam Altman will love this idea, because he already tried it with Worldcoin
free speech, civil liberties, voting, are in China all well below the standards of the west. The criticism and complaints were completely warranted and are still true today, whereas your comment falsely implies there is some parity.
could your comment be repaired to be reasonable? why bother, just read the rest of this discussion where people are debating these controls without trying to exonerate China.
If you do business with totalitarian societies that aren't made to liberalize, you too will become a totalitarian society.
Meanwhile in the Land Of The Free:
> Prairieland defendant sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of antifascist zines
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
> US President Donald Trump threatened a "10 year prison sentence" to anyone caught vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
https://www.dw.com/en/us-trump-threatens-prison-for-reflecti...
Comparing a private company's service to something run and maintained by an entire government on their population is disingenuous, to say the least.
I generally dislike services which require this level of identity verification but also, so far, those have mostly been freemium services and community tools. And I dislike gating those communities.
I'm sure I should have more of a problem with this.
My teen isn't super interested in AI, but whenever they do feel curious they have their own account they can use on our home network. As far as chatting goes local models are more than capable for handling standard chat questions, doing research, helping troubleshoot problems etc. In fact it was an agent powered by the same model that setup the open webui server and took care of all the account management features through my phone (using Hermes agent).
If you're building AI powered features and using sophisticated agent setups for coding for work, then it make sense to use SoTA from these providers. But I've been using local models increasingly for personal use and am starting to find them preferable (I run an uncensored, ephemeral model for my own use and it's an entirely different experience than anything you can pay for).
Still haven't cancelled my personal Anthropic subscription, but considering it soon.
Here is the Wayback Machine archive from April of their identity verification help page: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...
Here's a random Reddit thread from 2 months ago about them rolling out identity verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1smr9vs/claude_is...
Here is one random example thread of someone who got caught in identity verification with multiple follow-on comments from people who encountered the same problem, also 2 months old: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1sx25kd/buyer_b...
[ref: section 1.5 of Mythos/Fable 5 system card, https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...]
Maybe that was petty, but I was already looking for alternatives after the obvious angling for increased regulation and suppression of local models. LLMs are software and I want to modify them and run them on hardware that I own.
It's the same reason we require ID for alcohol and gun purchases. Obviously it isn't a perfect system, teens drink but good luck suggesting that 13 year old should be allowed to buy alcohol.
At this point it's completely outgrageous that the EU, UK, or even Canada can't put forth the funding to develop their own local AI model industry.