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- Hacker News
- The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?by Patient0
- I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.by whazor
- So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.by ssijak
- 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?)by scronkfinkle
- Wow, I realized today this is pretty crazy. but turns out it's old news, as old as Dec 2025, though the support page was only linked to in Jan 2026.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251223014541/https://support.c...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/protecting-well-being-of-user...
The ToS already prohibited it when it showed up back in Feb 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20240225205440/
by kikoreis - Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.
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?
by throwaw12 - Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.
I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
by mayhemducks - 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!