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.
Also Warsaw here and I'll do everything to keep my kids away from all those trashy "social media" which had been proven to hard society more than helping in anything.
It shorten concentration time significantly, promote false narrative who is successful and who is not and promotes pseudo science
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.
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.
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.
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:
Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.
Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.
Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
> 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.
They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? If you're being especially cynical, aren't OpenAI and Anthropic undermining American intellectual property by training their models on licensed IP without any compensation?
The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.
That side of it is understandable, albeit open to interpretation. I can see how both sides justify their own choices in the short term.
But we hear this "dumping" argument quite often for seemingly arbitrary purposes. Is it "dumping" to sell cheap STM-32 clones when Arm LTD. won't let you buy a license? Is it "dumping" to sell $20,000 EVs to a nation that can barely build $30,000 EVs with federal and state subsidies? In many respects, China's cheap stuff is just better-suited to the global economy than America's high-margin products. If both countries are leveraging federal protectionism to promote and develop their products, it doesn't feel like State Owned Enterprises are on unfair footing compared to SpaceX or OpenAI.
> Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing)
It's more likely that the API prices are highly profitable. I could see the subscription plans losing them money for some power users who actually use 100% every week, but given my past experience with subscription products I would estimate that their average utilization is far, far lower than in those comparisons where people take the tokens produced by exhausting the plan 100% and then compare to hypothetical API pricing.
As for economic dumping: The crucial difference is that there's usually some geopolitical influence happening, like government subsidies, incentives, or the government simply owning the companies directly and weaponizing their output even if the company runs at a loss.
Selling a product below its cost of production can be done as a loss leader or market share tactic, but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them.
Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.
isn't blitzscaling essentially the same thing, except for when American companies do it (not always within their own country, e.g. spotify, netflix, or amazon)
", but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them."
Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice
Somebody tell the Chinese companies to stop dumping AI, so US labs can keep burning pension funds money wrapped in VC checks fine dumping AI at a huge loss.
It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy.
The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)
Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.
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.
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.
Evidence of risk is not sufficient. It must always be balanced against potential benefits.
Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
Every day there is another story about the harmful effects of AI on literally everything, including mental health, IP theft, the climate, etc. "Think of the children" is and always has been a weak excuse.
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.
This is not my experience at all. Obviously I have some different usage from a teen (I doubt they’re doing much interior decorating), but it’s really an incredible resource for learning.
I’ve used it to break down different Supreme Court justices’ opinions and philosophies, explain words and concepts from research papers in other domains, the aforementioned interior design (including whipping up 3d models), book recommendations, custom recipes, and figuring out who to contact to learn about a street closure in NYC.
All of this in the past week.
It requires rigor and pushback. You can’t trust them entirely by default, but that’s true of the web as well!
They’re not the only source (augment with authoritative sources like cookbooks, your own research into topics, real live Humans), but it’s a fantastic resource for some healthy habits.
In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.
> 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.
I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.
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.
Some people cannot grasp how administrations appear to fight cultivation instead of promoting it, and given the unsightly appearance of many administrators, many people got to nurture the idea that administrations would want "masses of ignorant voters" to preserve their status as "elected".
It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.
Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
> Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
I think there's an analogy to physical roads there. Most of society is connecting by roads and adults driving cars, but that doesn't prevent children from participating in the things between the driving.
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.
Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
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.
The EU is also doing age verification by showing ID, only difference is that you have to trust that their zero proof concept works and they're doing what they say they do.
In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do.
The government isn't typically facilitating the check. In order to verify your age, you will be required to hand over your ID to a third party, who's privacy and security practices are likely: "Trust me bro."
Furthermore, I think many folks have reservations about requiring an ID checkpoint to utilize a computer. Obviously it's not that bad yet, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that the landscape is certainly trending in that direction, and it's absolutely not unreasonable to point out that governments and institutions to have a material interest in setting up access controls on who can and can't use the internet (read: participate in society).
Right, I'm not a fan of the ID check or identity/age verification. I'm just trying to understand the conspiracy theory kind of idea that "they're trying to get all our IDs!!!1!!" sentiment.
"The government already has our IDs" is missing the correlation between the ID and the service. They know your face and your name but not what you do on the internet. The website knows what you do on the internet but it isn't tied to your name. It's the tying them together which is the problem.
Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.
It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.
It's not possible to prove the user is anything ever. It probably never will be. Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID. Which is even more reason to reject ID verification.
Governments don't necessarily have the connection between your ID and what you do online, though, and some governments are known to massively buy publicly available data from data brokers to circumvent existing laws. By "some governments" I mean the US government, by the way. That's not a conspiracy either, it's well-documented.
> suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way
I'm not sure about that. As I see it, there is no business case for treating PII carefully: security costs money while leaking PII costs nothing and has no repercussions.
This has not been the case at any of my past employers in B2C...
There was a fair amount of scrambling to get GDPR/CCPA compliant, but even that was done largely with a prevailing "ah, this is a defensible thing to store, make sure you can annonymize it or scrub it if needed" vs "stop storing this."
Starting with the ones that are most popular in the US, "Big Tech" usually includes:
- Google - Gmail and Maps contain massive amount of PII, Photos contains all sorts of other sensitive stuff, and they have not treated those aspects of those products like radioactive waste
- Meta - Facebook has a real names required policy even. Not a lot more needs to be said there, I think.
- Amazon - Nothing I've seen about trying to move away from how they need your name/address/payment info and all. If anything, more and more geographic targeting and such.
- Microsoft - Now you need to tie your local Windows install to their cloud services, not moving away from collecting user info. Also moving towards subscriptions which means PII and payment info.
- Apple - cloud accounts + email + payments + subscriptions all here too. Getting into banking-type services, that's leaning into PII...
- Netflix - more and more PII (IP tracking and geolocation combined with things like email and name) to fight account sharing...
We don't want your static ID, we want where and what you are at this moment in order to better tune the algorithm. Your ID is frozen in time, so at any given moment, big tech knows more about you than the government does. IDs are only good for minimal verification purposes.
Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money.
GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly.
[1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a "full-mesh" of partnering of every SP with every bank directly would not scale.
If I had a bank, I'd trust it too, it being mine. Most people don't have the luxury, though. In practice, they have to outsource banking to other people. And those other people are already quite likely to move around between both Anthropic and various banks in search of whomever will offer them the most economic benefits. It is not like a particular logo on their current business card is going to change their character. You do you, of course, you are already unique in having a bank you can call your own so that won't be anything new for you. But the fact remains that most people strongly believe that a person's trustworthiness is of the person, not the activity they happen to be doing at the time.
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.
> 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.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
There's a lot of myopic comments about children on HN, but this argument is so insane it's worth pointing out.
You're essentially arguing to poison a well instead of inconveniencing yourself. You have agency, you're allegedly intelligent. But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.
There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
A minor that's educated enough to build their own is a different topic, but so many unmotivated or uniformed humans would quit if Claude simply didn't work. The barrier to entry is supposed to be the validation of comprehension.
Ultimately it will be ID verification. How else are you going to check age?
Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.
> Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life...
The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.
Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.
Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.
Counterargument, everyone lived a childhood, but not everyone lives adulthood, so childhood affects more people. Also related, childhood is foundational, what happens in childhood forms who you are as an adult, so issues in childhood affect you as an adult too.
Everything that happens in childhood affects everything after that, you know. Children aren't a separate class of people from adults. People are children, and then they are adults.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.
I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
I am a parent and I'm grossly offended by the thin veil of fake excuses in the effort to normalise staggering invasion of privacy.
For my kids.
This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.
If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.
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.
If you have an ineffective system for preventing a thing from happening, but one where the "victim" has to override the system, the victim is at fault.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
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.
It is not conspiracy theory. Optimizing for profit (which includes not crossing regulators/governments) is a good enough explanation usually. Big (and most small) companies put profit above anything else, so this is usually the right angle to approach anything they do.
Just as a curiosity, have you ever worked in big tech yourself, spoken "off-the-record" with managers or executives at these places or know closely people who do/have worked there?
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.
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.
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."
Reminiscent of this scene from the 1981 teen-slasher parody, Student Bodies:
> Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say "Fuck you."
That sound quality did something weird to my brain, I was convinced sound was accidentally coming out my laptop speakers not my headphones. I'm not even on my laptop, and I still took my headphones off to check.
Fear of a Black Hat, a rap mockumentary in the same vein as This is Spinal Tap, begins with a warning about the language in the movie that's essentially them repeating the offending words three or four times.
>Which is, of course, a bad thing that ought not to be encouraged
I'm not actually willing to take that as read. It's just the word "fuck". You may personally find it distasteful and you're welcome to discourage your children from using it but it seems like you're committing Pargin's Blunder here (mistaking norms specific to your social group for universal truths).
I've been using certain slurs as more proof-of-human, and any nuanced thinking that skirts by certain ideologies like Chechens hugging Russian artillery in 1995.
Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D
Great story! I remember sharing my screen at work recently and the URL bar suggested https://thisisnotporn.com/ because I had been playing it a bit on my phone and my browser history synced to my work. I dont know if anyone caught it but I started using a different browser after that. Because it indeed is not porn but hard to explain that!
Right this is exactly what happened with the new sesame laws. The government declared sesame as an allergen and enacted heavy fines if it was undisclosed. This lead to manufacturers adding sesame because they couldn't guarantee they were sesame free.
"May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product.
That's part of the problem. "May contain" doesn't provide legal protection and then if you make it a standard there needs to be testing for compliance which ends up as the same original problem and you just add compliance tits to your food product.
"May contain" should provide legal protection. It may be compliance tits in some cases, but that's better than forcing the addition of a compliance ingredient.
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
> Instead, some companies have taken a different approach. Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding "a minimal amount of sesame flour" to the company’s famous breadsticks "due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery."
> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.
Kinda orthogonal to this, but the other day I was looking for a friend's cheer routine on Instagram so I put her school name and cheerleader routine and I got a lot of images and videos of very young girls (like aged 6-16) in very revealing cheer outfits doing provocative dances which made me very uncomfortable for many reasons. Like first, why are you making your 6 year old do this, and second, why is Instagram floating these to the top instead of adults? I dont think I want to know the answers to either of those questions.
I mean, isn't this basically what's already happening after COPPA with YouTubers having to swear or make adult jokes to prove to the bots they're not targeting children with their videos?
Trying to collect personal info might not be the motivation but it's not at all a crackpot theory. And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
>And what's the conspiracy aspect of calling a big company a liar?
the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
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?
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.
Didn’t that id verification service that just had the massive breach also say similar about data retention? Doesn’t matter if they delete if the data is being intercepted somewhere along the line.
More likely, this is being done to comply with SB 1119 (Adam's Law) [1] 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 carry serious penalties if a minor is harmed or harms someone else due to their interaction with a chatbot (including emotional harm).
SB 1119 in particular has provisions that may be hard to comply with like banning "Using excessive praise or flattery that is disproportionate to the context."
I can understand why Anthropic would want to avoid this issue, given that they probably make almost no revenue from minors.
Thank you, I'm glad someone brought up SB 1119. I hate it.
California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.
Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
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.
I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)
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.
For non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
Sure, the categories can be expanded. For example, movie ratings aren't just "children" and "adults." But explaining the simple case seemed like enough for one comment.
There could be lock levels to this. By default everything is unlocked (level = 0), but if a content provider / host receives a signal/header with lock-level > 0 they should be required to honor it. Something like this would require government which means it will probably never happen. Much more power asymmetry to just track you.
There are many kinds of proxies. Proxies would have to be blocked if they don’t cooperate. Obviously a child-locked device shouldn’t let a client-side proxy be installed.
There should not be an HTTP header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. That puts the onus on the server to respect the header, and HTTP doesn't require any action on unrecognized headers. Also, it reveals to the server that the client's user is likely vulnerable to manipulation — exactly the opposite of what you want!
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
That standard is mostly used to indicate “adult” websites (porn, basically) which is useful, but rather a different thing than what I’m advocating. There are many websites intended for adults that should not be blocked when Google’s safe search is turned on.
It should be possible to write a web crawler for the children’s Internet. Whether it’s a client-side or server-side header doesn’t matter for that use case.
Roughly distinguishing between children and adults based on behavior can’t be stopped and shouldn’t be considered a privacy violation. For example, see how Lego does it: https://www.lego.com/en-us
A client-side header would let them do a redirect instead of a dialog box. There could be alternatively be a server-side header that causes a redirect, but either way, they could distinguish child-locked devices from unlocked based on the destination of the redirect.
If you want to make a child-safe website that is OK, it can go be in it's walled garden g-rated brand-safe reality. But that is retarded. The rest of the internet still exists, and will not stop existing. Porn/defense distributed/much more insidious things will still exist.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
> 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.
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.
This kind of thinking just leads to an obvious analogy: alcohol. Alcohol is harmful to children and adults. Yet when the United States tried Prohibition it was rolled back. It turns out that people want to do things harmful to themselves.
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.
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.
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?
Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 13.1 ms ] threadhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
It shorten concentration time significantly, promote false narrative who is successful and who is not and promotes pseudo science
Most of my kids grew up just fine being fully connected and with social networks but I know of children for which TikTok would truly be detrimental.
Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
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.
AI companies have the same fear of underage users that tobacco companies of underage smokers.
> reasonable usage for school age children
Comical to believe that any of these companies care. They are out to MAKE MONEY. That’s the only believable motivation for what the do.
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
With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope
If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.
It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? If you're being especially cynical, aren't OpenAI and Anthropic undermining American intellectual property by training their models on licensed IP without any compensation?
The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
But we hear this "dumping" argument quite often for seemingly arbitrary purposes. Is it "dumping" to sell cheap STM-32 clones when Arm LTD. won't let you buy a license? Is it "dumping" to sell $20,000 EVs to a nation that can barely build $30,000 EVs with federal and state subsidies? In many respects, China's cheap stuff is just better-suited to the global economy than America's high-margin products. If both countries are leveraging federal protectionism to promote and develop their products, it doesn't feel like State Owned Enterprises are on unfair footing compared to SpaceX or OpenAI.
It's more likely that the API prices are highly profitable. I could see the subscription plans losing them money for some power users who actually use 100% every week, but given my past experience with subscription products I would estimate that their average utilization is far, far lower than in those comparisons where people take the tokens produced by exhausting the plan 100% and then compare to hypothetical API pricing.
As for economic dumping: The crucial difference is that there's usually some geopolitical influence happening, like government subsidies, incentives, or the government simply owning the companies directly and weaponizing their output even if the company runs at a loss.
I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?
Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.
Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice
The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)
Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.Which is dwarfed by the harmful effects of social media (engagement farming).
Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I think the articles you are talking about haven’t even been interesting enough to click on.
Children are being unconditionally banned from using major technologies, preventing them from benefiting at all. My life would have turned out very differently if I had been banned from using computers back when I was a kid. I don't want my own kids to grow up without the same freedom I enjoyed.
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’ve used it to break down different Supreme Court justices’ opinions and philosophies, explain words and concepts from research papers in other domains, the aforementioned interior design (including whipping up 3d models), book recommendations, custom recipes, and figuring out who to contact to learn about a street closure in NYC.
All of this in the past week.
It requires rigor and pushback. You can’t trust them entirely by default, but that’s true of the web as well!
They’re not the only source (augment with authoritative sources like cookbooks, your own research into topics, real live Humans), but it’s a fantastic resource for some healthy habits.
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.
Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care
Yes, many nominal adults are factual minors.
> This level of
Some educational systems are propaganda machines.
Some people cannot grasp how administrations appear to fight cultivation instead of promoting it, and given the unsightly appearance of many administrators, many people got to nurture the idea that administrations would want "masses of ignorant voters" to preserve their status as "elected".
All of this is pretty trivial.
And stop calling LLMs "AI".
Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.
I think there's an analogy to physical roads there. Most of society is connecting by roads and adults driving cars, but that doesn't prevent children from participating in the things between the driving.
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.
Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...
Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?
Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
In the US we just assume no one does what they say they do.
It would be detrimental to the cause, which is to collect everyone's ID.
Seeing as how these companies get hacked all the time, (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...) , I don't think it's unreasonable to resist this.
Furthermore, I think many folks have reservations about requiring an ID checkpoint to utilize a computer. Obviously it's not that bad yet, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that the landscape is certainly trending in that direction, and it's absolutely not unreasonable to point out that governments and institutions to have a material interest in setting up access controls on who can and can't use the internet (read: participate in society).
Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.
It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.
Exactly. Which in turn requires you to have some way of tying those accounts to that ID, which was supposed to be the thing to be prevented.
Most user data is of minimal economic value, until you leak it, and then suddenly there are millions of euros of fines headed your way.
Better to not hold the data in the first place.
Storing all that information is cheap nowadays. Any state agency may be happy to get more information about The People.
They're collecting more than ever.
I'm not sure about that. As I see it, there is no business case for treating PII carefully: security costs money while leaking PII costs nothing and has no repercussions.
There was a fair amount of scrambling to get GDPR/CCPA compliant, but even that was done largely with a prevailing "ah, this is a defensible thing to store, make sure you can annonymize it or scrub it if needed" vs "stop storing this."
Starting with the ones that are most popular in the US, "Big Tech" usually includes:
- Google - Gmail and Maps contain massive amount of PII, Photos contains all sorts of other sensitive stuff, and they have not treated those aspects of those products like radioactive waste
- Meta - Facebook has a real names required policy even. Not a lot more needs to be said there, I think.
- Amazon - Nothing I've seen about trying to move away from how they need your name/address/payment info and all. If anything, more and more geographic targeting and such.
- Microsoft - Now you need to tie your local Windows install to their cloud services, not moving away from collecting user info. Also moving towards subscriptions which means PII and payment info.
- Apple - cloud accounts + email + payments + subscriptions all here too. Getting into banking-type services, that's leaning into PII...
- Netflix - more and more PII (IP tracking and geolocation combined with things like email and name) to fight account sharing...
Which ones were running away from it, exactly?
For what reason should I trust a bank?
GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly.
[1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a "full-mesh" of partnering of every SP with every bank directly would not scale.
This is fantastic, except that the idea of mandatory government software only available on chosen proprietary platforms feels way worse.
If there were a way to crypto-notarize a third-party wallet token etc blah blah, then it would be interesting.
At the end of the day though, this is about protecting the powerful, not the kids.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
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.
Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative impacts on adults are, mathematically, bigger in anyone's life than same impact on children?
It get even tinier if you factor that the slice of life were someone is old enough to use Claude, willing to do so and minor at the same time is really small.
Even more if you try to articulate how Claude could be more harmful to an educated minor than any other activities.
You're essentially arguing to poison a well instead of inconveniencing yourself. You have agency, you're allegedly intelligent. But it sounds like you're so dependent on Claude you can't even conceive of using an alternative.
There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
A minor that's educated enough to build their own is a different topic, but so many unmotivated or uniformed humans would quit if Claude simply didn't work. The barrier to entry is supposed to be the validation of comprehension.
I don't use Claude whatsoever.
> There are NUMEROUS alternatives available. If you lack the agency to subvert the check or implement an alternative that's on you.
I know there is, but I also know this trend of age verification bullshit is coming for everything, and that's a problem.
Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.
The loudest parents absolutely cannot. I don't know if this is because of the sleep-deprivation-induced brain damage that caring for a tiny human for their first year or so gives you or what, but there are some very loud, very neurotic people out there who appear to have forgetten that humans live for sixty to a hundred years.
Childhood is a tiny slice of life and if these folks had the time and ability to sit down and think very clearly and carefully, they'd see that making it so much harder for parents, relatives, and authority figures to get away with child abuse -sexual or otherwise- does far more to keep minors safe than removing those minors' ability to talk to adult strangers.
Hell, being able to talk to adult strangers is one way minors can both realize that they're being abused and find a way to get out of that abusive situation. To borrow a dark meme, it's hard to know that Penis Inspection Time isn't a legitimate activity when you can't talk to anyone who knows better.
In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.
For my kids.
This effort trains them to expose their full name and home address and their real face to all the sites and services that request it. Predators dream, really.
If the age verification was done in the privacy-preserving ways, it would be okay, but already several high profile leaks and scandals proved this is the exercise in data collection and deanonymisaiton.
I doubt that this statement is true.
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.
Your honor, the user manual in the box did say "don't put children in the microwave."
LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever
Are you capable of identifying dystopian movements the single moves of which get justified as "for people's good"?
Interest groups and politicians DO conspire.
Governments DO conspire.
Big corporations DO conspire.
When you have the mix of everything above, they definitely conspire.
“Theory” part is only about finding out WHAT the actual conspiracy is. That can be reasonable, or outlandish, facts based or fantasy.
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.
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.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
Every middle schooler in high schooler in America is snickering right now... :)
Do you really think most people use fake data on a paid service? I don't think so.
"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."
> Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an "R" rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the moviegoing public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say "Fuck you."
> [the MPAA R-rating logo appears on the screen]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083133/quotes/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzHKwhrN1Lg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmaaZtINRU
I'm not actually willing to take that as read. It's just the word "fuck". You may personally find it distasteful and you're welcome to discourage your children from using it but it seems like you're committing Pargin's Blunder here (mistaking norms specific to your social group for universal truths).
While the reasons may elude, the ubiquity speaks to something foundational.
Ha! At one point some years back, in an internal presentation somebody used an image of an old computer that if you really, really squinted and looked closely, had a topless woman in ascii art in a small area of the computer screen. It was so hard to see that most of us didn't even notice, but one eagle eye did and caused a whole shit storm around it. If the presenter would have said, "Those are just compliance tits" I think my life would have been complete :-D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116211
Yes, this causes problems.
> and then if you make it a standard there needs to be testing for compliance
Why would there need to be any additional testing? If anything I'd expect "may" foods to need less testing than an accident-prone "no" food.
https://www.fox9.com/news/new-us-food-label-law-unintended-e...
> Some companies include statements on labels that say a food "may contain" a certain product or that the food is "produced in a facility" that also uses certain allergens. However, such statements are voluntary, not required, according to the FDA, and they do not absolve the company of requirements to prevent cross-contamination.
> Instead, some companies have taken a different approach. Officials at Olive Garden said that starting this week, the chain is adding "a minimal amount of sesame flour" to the company’s famous breadsticks "due to the potential for cross-contamination at the bakery."
> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.
Your dismissal is so much weaker than the post you're replying to.
the conspiracy aspect is alleging a conspiracy without providing any evidence, which is apparently how 90% of people function now. Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
Nobody alleged a conspiracy.
> Calling someone a liar because you invented a conversation in your head isn't entirely sane
That's not why they said that. This is a ridiculous criticism of OP.
SB 1119 in particular has provisions that may be hard to comply with like banning "Using excessive praise or flattery that is disproportionate to the context."
I can understand why Anthropic would want to avoid this issue, given that they probably make almost no revenue from minors.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
California already has BPC §§ 22601-22606 to protect people from chatbots encouraging self-harm and I don't see a legitimate reason why they had to ratchet up the restrictions.
This law seems a blatant regulatory capture grift by OpenAI to calcify their teen mode into law and hurt competitors. https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-...
At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Never using Claude just to spite the ad campaign
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.
For non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
No, that leaves vulnerable adults unprotected. It should be "Is my thing in one of the categories of things that this device says this user is not permitted to do? If so, I shall not permit this user to do the thing.".
Nothing stops software authors from providing pre-built bundles of categories that they believe fit certain types of vulnerable people [0], but the fine-grained control must be there so that guardians can choose to set things up for those they guard so to adequately protect them while minimizing the amount of stuff that they're blocked from.
[0] Like: "Overly-trusting human who needs protection from scams", "Dementia-damaged adult who cannot be trusted to manage their finances", "Median sixteen year old USian", etc, etc.
what happens when the request goes through a proxy and that proxy is configured to strip this header?
Instead, there should be an HTTP header indicating that the server is an adult-only website. Then, child-locked devices can refuse to show the content to their users. Moreover, this can be more granular than just a single adult-only bit.
This standard has existed for 30 years and was supported in Internet Explorer 3; it's called PICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
If the current age verification controversy was intended to protect children rather than destroy anonymous speech, it would be focused on requiring the implementation of PICS or something similar.
It should be possible to write a web crawler for the children’s Internet. Whether it’s a client-side or server-side header doesn’t matter for that use case.
Roughly distinguishing between children and adults based on behavior can’t be stopped and shouldn’t be considered a privacy violation. For example, see how Lego does it: https://www.lego.com/en-us
A client-side header would let them do a redirect instead of a dialog box. There could be alternatively be a server-side header that causes a redirect, but either way, they could distinguish child-locked devices from unlocked based on the destination of the redirect.
All the age verification is is creeping totalitarianism by governments.
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.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
They exempted Linux, from what I remember reading.
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.
However is just a number you put, I can have 200 years old :-)
We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.
Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???
Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.
Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!
Thanks