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  • Hacker News
  • The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
    by pr337h4m
  • Treating children and teenagers as the same group is out of control.
    by BeFlatXIII
  • 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.
    by logicchains
  • How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?
    by de-moray
  • 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.

    by xpct
  • This will mean the next generation will grow up with open source AI. High schools and junior colleges offering computer courses will have to give their students different coding tools than the industry standard.
    by xacky
  • Or the industry standard will change
    by ghostpepper
  • Or they will use OpenAI, which allows guardians to complete age verification and enable work for kids age 13 to 17.

    Anthropic will likely open up, too. Right now both companies have more than enough demand and don't want to risk any journalists trying to do another "think of the children" panic.

    by Aurornis
  • Good, the less capable they are, the more students will actually have to learn.
    by mpalmer
  • Looks like they're using Yoti for identity verification, which just got fined $1 mil for biometric data protection violations.

    https://www.biometricupdate.com/202603/spains-aepd-fines-yot...

    by taikon
  • 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.
    by planb
  • The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.
    by frosty_lemon
  • > 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.

    by Aurornis
  • The date says May 18, 2026 - so this is four months old, right?
    by Patient0
  • 300 messages and counting, and you're the first one I see making the comment. Shame on everybody here for not doing their basic due diligence of reading the fkn article before posting or reacting
    by khalic
  • Yes, I'm wondering why it's upvoted like this is something new today. What's going on?
    by LUmBULtERA
  • That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?
    by kalkin
  • 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
  • Indeed, it is almost like most adults care about kids getting a good healthy start in life, and avoiding the horrendous mistakes of falling for psychopathic cons. =3
    by Joel_Mckay
  • And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.
    by duskdozer
  • > ... at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality.

    I'd not realised the ban covers child brains too. /i

    by chrisjj
  • Perhaps they can make their ideas reality by learning the fundamentals required to do these things.

    As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.

    Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.

    by NichoPaolucci
  • If you give an average classroom of 12 year olds free access to AI, do you think the AVERAGE effect will be that the kids will use the AI to dive really deep into topics and learn programming, or that they will copy and paste the solutions to their homework, and use the freed up time to do other things than study?
    by hobom
  • I think over time due the regulations like these younger generations in western countries like US/UK would fall far behind compared to the counterpart in India or China when it comes to AI fluency.

    I remember when I was a kid growing up there was the same negative perception on internet back then and most people were not allowing internet access to their kids because of porn. But I had access since I was 13 (it was still dial-up) and thank god I did because I wouldn't be a software engineer if I hadn't.

    I taught myself on how to build web pages in dreamweaver, program in visual basic and even to make animations in flash by the time I was 14. One could argue that young kids should learn those skills without the help of AI, but then again, one could argue that I should have learned computing by punch hole and assembly language to learn how it actually works.

    What people don't realize is that soon AI would be a new abstraction layer, same as the high level language abstraction we've learned and those languages won't matter just like we don't worry about assembly right now, and I truly feel sorry for the kids that's gonna miss the opportunity to learn AI on their own.

    by sajithdilshan
  • 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 agree with you - but there's also a lot of people that think AI is just brainrot - maybe worse, so, there's that...
    by onlyrealcuzzo
  • What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.
    by 00deadbeef
  • 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
  • > 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.

    by f6v
  • 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?
    by MintPaw