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  • I really don't like that headlines have been surfacing about the US government putting pressure on Anthropic, and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).

    I may very well stop using Claude due to this.

    Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.

    EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.

  • Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633 - 67 days ago, 100 comments

    As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.

    Discord dropped them after user backlash.

  • Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.
  • Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching

    https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund

  • This page has been up since April: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...

    I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.

    You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.

  • Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.

    It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...

  • OpenAI also has this kind of check. What is especially bad is that if you fail the verification process, they won’t let you retry – you are permanently locked out from the top models. They aren’t clear about this upfront during the process, so make sure the lighting is good when you scan your ID!

    https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...

  • The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.

    The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.

    As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.

    Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.

    So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.

    I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.

    From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.

    There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.

    The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.

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