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.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.
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.
Such as?
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.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Of course the government should do something. They should punish the neglectful parent, and take away the child if needed.
What I'm missing is the logical leap to "everyone must give their sensitive personal information to an overseas corporation".
Also these kids will grow up to do harm to the communities in that state, which will spend more money at the end cleaning up those mistakes.
Right now governments in western societies are pouring more money and resources than ever into support programs, and yet we still have record high levels of mental health, unemployment, poverty, waiting times for doctors and support staff etc etc.
Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
See here for much information about how spending has increased in these sectors in the UK, yet simultaneously seeing increasingly higher percentage levels of people requiring support in our societies.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
Where do you think this trend will end? Do you think governments spending more tax money on these services will solve the problem?
So I'll tell you right now that I don't have proof or evidence for my claims, but my impression is that:
- Agreed that the solution will not be just blindly pouring more money into community resources. But I am not convinced that these organizations getting money really understand how to help people. It's sort of like the D.A.R.E. program in college. These people are so out of touch with what college students will listen to. But I'm sure donors of these programs will pat themselves on their back when they reiterate their mission statements.
- There is probably some correlation between bad parenting and income. If you need to work more to pay the bills, its difficult to spend your time and attention toward your kids. Obviously, "economy" is not an easy problem to solve haha.
- Information asymmetry/overload I feel is a big issue. Look at how any mainstream news media on the left or right will trivialize any issue, or distract you from more important things. Or look at websites relying on dark patterns to lure users.
- So many solutions require longer time periods to fully realize. If we say "improving education will help solve our problems", then we will probably need to wait longer than a US president's two terms to see if those solutions works.
Ultimately, we don't need "more" solutions, we need "better" solutions. We need things like leaders who understand system dynamics, education systems that teach emotional intelligence, and a culture around science that isn't driven by monetary incentives.
I am personally very inspired by Sanya Nishtar's efforts in Pakistan to spend her time and money investigating how focusing on solutions at the scale of individual communities and utilizing modern technological solutions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBkavI3jxY
Really trying to assume good faith here, but it's hard ...
We have record high levels of people needing support at the same time we have record high levels of spending on that support? What an outrage! Obviously nothing is working and government bad!
Of course the spending on support services goes up as more people need that support. We're supposed to assume that's some sort of failure?
> Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
If by "proven" you mean "kinda maybe arguable if you intentionally misrepresent correlational studies", sure.
It's a complex fantasy humanity has made up, where our current generational burnout is instead given names like autism and ADHD - so that we can pretend that we have something to "fix".
The irony is that the goal of the fix is to "get these outliers back into society, (so that humanity can be as collectively productive as we should be)".
Even more ironic are the next cries : "They're not getting fixed. Take away their money."
These statistics don't necessarily imply that the programs don't improve the situation, only that mental health outcomes are worsening faster than programs are improving them. The existence of support programs could also encourage more measurement of mental health issues, which says nothing about the ground truth.
This data does not support the argument made here.
Given an effective sample size, parents have a much higher success rate ensuring children do not grow up as hazards to the society than publicly-funded programs do.
You seem to be missing the catch-22 situation here.
I don't think it's an either or situation. We are on the precipice of a paradigm that's barely comprehensible to the average populace. There needs to be a conversation first before anything is decided. Everyone is too quick on the trigger.
What do any of these have to do with you handing over you ID to some random web service?
Whatever it is it should at least try to be data driven. And have a strong connection with harms and dysfunction. None of this 2% non-reproducible study BS.
More than 50% of boys admit to intentionally viewing poor, and most of them weekly.
Many think this is a slam dunk for a nanny state to step in. But surely we would have hard causal data on the need for it if that was the case? And I’m pretty sure we don’t.
Now let’s apply this simple bar to Claude, etc.
Who decides what is bad parenting? You tread on dangerous grounds.
> Define bad parenting?
Parents that do things that are bad for their kids wellbeing.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Yes it should do nothing
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
Yes they should
> Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
These days modern jails are rehabilitation centres so its a moot point, but yes we should.
I know this is not popular, you can choose to downvote me if you like. But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it. IMO perfect is the enemy of good here.
I'm not sure "make sure kids have food" rises to the level of "perfection" when it comes to measuring society.
But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it.
I think many would argue that a society unwilling to feed or educate children is pretty "broken".
Is willing to make sure kids are fed bad, but making sure that kids aren't physically or sexually abused fine? Or is that also off the table because we don't want to make life too easy for everyone?
Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?
Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?
This is a ridiculous and incoherent belief. Ensuring children have enough food to survive isn't making life "too comfortable". Letting millions of children starve and/or never get an education because you don't like the vibes of it is sociopathic and is what will actually break society. We should not tolerate child abuse just because you think intervening makes society too soft.
I'm sure you wouldn't feel the same way if you were that starving child or grew up with imperfect parents or in an environment that had actual hardships. This lack of basic empathy and introspection can only occur from someone who has been completely isolated from much of the real world their entire life. You are not arguing against perfect being the enemy of good, you are arguing against having any sort of good in the world at all, and it's obviously coming from a place of extreme comfort and luxury.
There's no chance you'd be saying anything like this if you had ever experienced anything close to poverty and starvation. Ironically, it appears having an upbringing that is too comfortable is what causes these beliefs in the first place.
[dead]
> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.
The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.
There's different kinds of shitty and they didn't mean that kind.
Then don't use the shitty to justify what to do with the not really shitty. It's a logical fallacy.
Nobody did that. When they said "shitty" they meant the specific kind relevant to the rules they were discussing.
Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
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
If luck = something you didn’t choose or had no control over, sure.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
And 2 is lucky it is the sum of 1+1.
I want to live in a free society that has some level of justice.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
If you'd like to advocate for this position for a living, the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries will all be happy to pay you.
Kids do all of this stuff anyways, making it illegal doesn't stop it from happening.
But we're not talking about a product that kills its users, we're talking about a polymath that can help its users build and create things. Are you intellectually prepared to believe that Claude Code is as dangerous as cigarettes, a product that kills 50% of its users? Do you genuinely believe, as a core belief, that Claude Code will kill 50% of the people that use it?
> we're not talking about a product that kills its users
Yeah, it just pushes the ones with the tendency to do it themselves.
Are you being sardonic, or can you seriously not tell the difference in harm between smoking cigarettes and Claude?
I genuinely don't understand how you can survive in the world with a risk assessment system this damaged.
"Think of the kids!" OK but the impact of this technology shouldn't be underestimated and one doesn't only have to read up on the extreme ends. From personal experience, have you ever "chatted" with a model outside of technical/work related stuff? Both Anthropic as well as OpenAI models have been overstepping personal (user) boundaries for years now. There are multiple reasons for why Google hasn't capitalized on the transformer much earlier..
I'm neither a proponent of the recent Zuckerberg maneuver to "protect the children!" nor of the EU based zero-knowledge proof track, but the people in those companies need to be kept accountable.
The new Claude availability constraints seem to me then like a (late) hedge against any major litigations on that front..
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AI-induced_psycho...
They're absolutely doing this as a hedge against litigation, and given the trillion dollar lawsuits flying around, it's hard for me to blame them. Regulation by litigation rather than law creates ambiguous legal precedents that make it much harder to do business safely. That's why the most economically successful countries in the world tend to have the strongest rule of law.
The actual root cause of this is our culture moving away from the idea that individuals and families should be free to make these sorts of decisions, and instead believing that heavy-handed authoritarian governments should dictate those choices to us instead.
I actually disagree, I think the problem is that heavy-handed companies have been dictating choices to us and our children, in contradiction to existing laws, and people are finally saying enough, these companies need to follow the laws.
> 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
The libertarian types can be just as highly resistant to facts as any other political lean.
> 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.
Why do you want to add friction to teens having a creativity tool that can help them learn and build things?
I don't know what kind of kid you were, but as a kid I would have loved access to my own 24/7 polymath, it would have been an incredibly positive thing in my life. I often think of how much more cool stuff I would have accomplished with that ability. It would have actually benefited my mental health issues a lot, which often rotated around the boredom of living an isolated life in the suburbs and my imagination being unable to keep up with my free time and abilities.
If you add friction to good things in addition to bad things, you're just increasing the likelihood that the bad things will be chosen more often. You're also increasing the chances that people will not trust you when you say the actually bad things are bad, because you lied to them about the other thing so maybe you're lying to them about all of it?
This has 'social media will bring us all together' vibes.
Seeing what it’s done to my VP’s and execs I can’t imagine the damage it’s going to children smh
> 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.
People have a right to privacy. People should value that more, before it's all gone.
They have a right to privacy, but they don't have the right to your product.
If people have a right to privacy, why is it disappearing?
The tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries want a lot of things, but it doesn't make those things bad by default.
I don't have a problem showing an ID, I have a problem with an ID being recorded so it can be leaked.
Unless you think they are outright lying, the press release does say it will be immediately deleted.
Well in the ID scan leak wasn't there just a stream of data that was stolen? Deletion doesn't matter in that case.
I don’t think they are outright lying, but a similar third-party identity verification service was compromised recently. every ID scanned at a Hertz rental car counter was siphoned to the attacker’s system.
The company might not be storing your scans, but there’s always the chance someone else might be. I’d prefer to not risk it.
Identify a harm first and then go through the deliberative process. The company deciding it wants this usually means you run the other way, not towards it. Did Big Tobacco volunteer to think of the children?
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
This is the way!
We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will stop a teenager saving up their pocket money and buying an inexpensive second-hand device themselves - the parents' only option to fight back is the ballot box.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
And if your parents suck? (Mine did.)
I think the power for parents to have free reign over everything in a child's life should be reduced if the parents are abusive, but of course there is no way to do this short of infallible and invasive surveillance. All to say, there is no easy solution here.
Abusive parents are not going to "think of the children" either way, no matter what arguments the well-meaning parents give. They will not see a problem with their own behavior. So assuming the parent is a sacrosanct figure that always knows what's best is unworkable.
I understand that no parent wants to be accused of being abusive, but just because it is taboo to say it out loud, does not mean these people do not exist. They're out there. They will fuck up their child's minds and cause long-lasting damage, Internet access or not.
It's no wonder children react poorly to the Internet when the two people they have to depend on for their literal survival don't support them at a good enough level. They seek out comfort when they can't get it elsewhere and now it's supposedly a tech CEO's fault they're addicted. My life could have been different if one single adult I could trust had supported me, but I didn't get one. Not all children will, either.
Everyone's parents "suck"--they're humans, they're learning, they have problems of their own they struggle with, etc. There are no purely good parents. I'm not excusing actually wretched family conditions, but have been noticing almost every young adult now deplores an unfair childhood--and I can't help but think we'd all be healthier if we could recognize that a childhood with some problems is statistically quite "fair."
I'm sorry your parents sucked.
I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.
In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.
They at least have some sort of a take a selfie and some app guesses your age based on the photo option that I had not heard of.
> Accepted age verification methods
> Yoti offers several ways to confirm you're 18 or over. You can choose whichever works best for you:
> * Facial age estimation: Take a selfie and Yoti's technology estimates your age. No ID document needed.
> * ID verification: Take a photo of your ID (such as a passport, driving license, or national ID card) and upload it from your device. See Yoti's full list of supported documents for country-specific options.
> * Yoti’s Digital ID app: If you already have the Yoti app, share a verified "over 18" attribute from it.
Admittedly it's not as if the government is immune to massive data leaks either
Unfortunately we live in a litigious society. The more you observe, you'll see that companies and government make decisions to reduce culpability and offload risk.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.
You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.
You get that, right? Right?
"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.
I think they meant it more as
"Let parents decide if their kids can use this tool and have them prevent access to it if not."