Claude is only available to people over 18 years

Took a bit of poking, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDQ5z7bNPs

And one of the rare incidences of the MPAA ratings banner appearing in the middle of a film.

Joke's on you, as standards loosen now PG-13 movies get up to eleven "fuck"s to distribute throughout the film (nineteen for documentaries)

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmaaZtINRU

"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.

do you have an example of this? it feels like a suboptimal response even given the stupid, heavy-handed legislation you cite.

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!

Add beauty pageants to that list. It's gross, and a lot of people are ok with it.

What use is this when you can just prompt the LLM to insert those or use any other style of writing that looks human?

Also the Dixel for the male option.

Whilst this is OP's point, the reality is the majority of big tech companies have been treating user data like radioactive waste for 10+ years.

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.

Whose cause? I think the government already has our IDs, given that they issued them.

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.

Its actually to leak your gov't ID so data brokers can soak it up

QAnon for nerds

Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.

The whole thing is pointless.

EU parliament gets bonuses?

This is why you have a relay in the middle.

Then, Chase knows you've verified your ID somewhere, the relay knows that some Chase user verified themselves at Pornhub, and Pornhub knows that the user is over 18, without knowing their identity or what bank they're using.

You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection. The latter is more secure but more complex, the former is much simpler and openness friendly.

I think the key here is “a trusted third party” more than “bank”.

Also, I’d rather a company know “he has an account at Bank of America” than “His full government name is Bit Masher and his driving license number is 9”

Well, they already know your credit card issuer, it's not that wild. Really Visa/MasterCard should offer age verification on their network... They have all the necessary components.

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.

I trust my bank a whole lot more than I trust Anthropic

I think many linux users will apparently have been born on Jan 1 1970

I can't figure out if you're joking or not.

Right, Sending off my data to some random 3rd party company with far lower stakes does not make me feel better.

I 105 percent trust anything and everything a zillion dollar company promises!

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.

Unless you have Bill Gates money, you don't have access to a mental health professional (much less your mental health professional who knows your life situation) when a girlfriend dumps you over text at 1AM. And that's when you may need one most.

People want to talk to their therapist after an argument with their husband or when their boss fires them, not Friday after next.

Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.

Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.

I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.

The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.

So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.

I'm sure many use their parents' credit card. In which case, the parent would do the "verification" and the minor uses the account anyway.

So in your example a microwave company should be held liable if someone puts a child in a microwave?

>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

Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.

I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.

But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.

Because Anthropic would never sell ad space. Promise. /s

You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.

you think knowing whether a user is 18 or older is more valuable than browser/cli/network finger prints?

Truly naive is the mirror you're looking into.

We agree these are useless contrivances, but positing constantly that "this is just some great surveillance game" as opposed to the offloading of government responsibilities to private industry in the hope of removing all social regulatory liabilities?

Naive is how you spell that.

[dead]

Yes multiple companies in people's favorite acronyms.

Being good at matching patterns doesn't mean the patterns you found have the causal relationships you think they have

Superstition in pigeons: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001

That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

“Suspicion is the same as fact”

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.

Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.

> 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.

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.

Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p

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.

To be clear, I made no mention of the state or responsibility.

All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.

There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.

Define bad parenting?

Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?

Should they go hungry when not fed?

Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?

The libertarian "eh whatever" means of government has a lot of negative side effects too.

There's different kinds of shitty and they didn't mean that kind.

This is a very cogent observation that I'm afraid is going to go over many heads. Children and parents are intrinsically suited to each other by genetics, shared environment, and other empirical factors. Societal and legal reasoning that asserts a child as a Platonic form cannot in fact benefit the singular development of that child.

i.e., luck

> we're not talking about a product that kills its users

Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.

> making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.

Arguing to give kids unfettered access to it but won’t even use it yourself to fact check your own nonsense

> Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.

This so completely untrue! These things are absolutely effective for the majority of kids. Just because some stand out in a crowd, doesn't mean others are doing it too.

When trying to prevent something, the more friction you add the better.

> Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes

Yes. Death is just one of the results. There are many, many other ways this could dangerously impact children.

Unless you think they are outright lying, the press release does say it will be immediately deleted.

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?

> 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? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.

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.

Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.

I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports.

Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.

My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".

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.

I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors

If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.

> They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.

I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply:

    On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring.

    **Background**
    - The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure.
    - What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support.
    - In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners.

    **June 3–4**
    - In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4.
    - Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4.
    - The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute.

    **Aftermath**
    - A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed.
    - Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed.
    - China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics.
    - The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law.

    Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history.

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.

Who does?

Then what's the reason behind this decision?

I feel I would be in a much better place if I had been banned from using computers as a kid. It's all relative.

Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children.

Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.