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Identity verification on Claude

support.claude.com

491–500 of 765 posts

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#491

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…

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. > 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. Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really h…

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet?

I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?

> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person. > Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm hi…

>Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?

You do not need real documents if your goal is to get the person locked out by using fake documents.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not only is it up for debate, I find it extremely unlikely to be true. I don't really disagree with the rest of your post but I very strongly doubt that Opus 4.8 will be the best American LLM you'll have access to this year.

Why, is there any evidence to support your claim?

Polymarket gives 32% chance the ban on Fable is lifted this month.

Even if it's never lifted, probably GPT 5.6 will be better than Opus 4.8 and they won't hype it up as too dangerous to release before releasing it.

Open models will catch up to Opus 4.8 and state of the art will, most likely, continue to get better. It won't be long before "better than Opus 4.8" is not a big deal.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. > 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. Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really h…

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet? I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

Meanwhile, as an irregular user of heavy AI, I like the usage-based billing of deepseek. Made a bunch of optimizations to my vibe-coded codebase, created some extra modules, using the chat... has costed me 33 cents so far in a couple weeks.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#495

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.

Did anthropic bar the use of any of their models behind an ID process back in April?

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. > 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. Excellent point... That made me rethink my payments to Anthropic. As one of the foreign peasants who was banned from accessing Fable by the land of the free, it's become really h…

What is stopping you from switching to GLM 5.2 now? Have you tried it out yet? I'm playing with Deepseek a lot more via OpenRouter recently and the only major downside I can see is the usage billing over the monthly plan

Existing setup. I'm already used to Claude Code I guess. I actually spent time and tokens customizing and fixing it. Have a patcher utility that modifies the binary in order to disable telemetry and remove performance reducing language in the system prompts. Every update I spend some Claude tokens dissecting the newest executable and integrating it with my patcher.

The monthly subscription is also a major hurdle for me. The "high end frontier models for low prices" aspect is a major reason. I think I'm getting a lot of value from my subscription, given that the API prices are like a hundred times higher.

However, there's also a psychological factor here. These subscriptions are like the gachas of the software world. I got "addicted" to them. I developed workflows around achieving 100% weekly usage. Sometimes Anthropic randomly resets weekly usage and I scramble to get the most out of it. I'll point Claude at things and then just have it run hundreds of code review agents. I ran out of projects to do this on and started doing it to my favorite open source projects instead, looking for things to contribute.

I think with usage-based pricing I wouldn't use LLMs quite so freely. It'd probably cure my "addiction" too, but the problem is I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, since this "addiction" has been a somewhat positive force in my life. It's driven me to start new projects and also make major progress on existing ones. It brought me out of a slump. I'm a little afraid of moving away from Claude and not being as driven as I was before.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#497

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...

As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ... what did you do to trigger a verification process?

It's frustrating that I can't find docs that even pretend to answer this question. Maybe it's my fault, maybe I overlooked it? I hope so.

To me, without documented use cases where you might/likely/certainly trigger identity verification, how can I properly limit my curiosity as someone who will gladly stay on the safe side for SOTA cloud model use? I'll happily stay away from these topics if I'm informed on what they are, even if the docs are vague.

Does anyone have insight into the answer to this? What API calls? What user behavior? What topics should I let go unanswered (or converse about with local LLMs) if I want to avoid losing access to the tooling?

The thought that they don't/won't publish this document should scare everyone. That leads to "because I said so" service refusal that is a very slippery slope.

I do understand that all businesses are allowed to refuse service to me in the USA, from food trucks to AWS, and that's fine with me. But at least tell me your rules and extra verification trigger criteria so I have a chance of not using your service in a way that concerns you.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note the big cut in token prices from China. After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.

and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.

Taiwan? South China Sea?

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#499

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.

Did anthropic bar the use of any of their models behind an ID process back in April?

The answer seems to be yes [0]. Although I think it's important to state The Web Archive link proves that the recent Fable banning was not the catalyst for the page being linked.

Will Fable be back behind an ID verification step? I wouldn't be shocked if that happened. However, this specific support page and the ID veridiction process is not new. It is currently enforce.

It appears (but I can't be certain and don't think it's in bad faith) that many people are under the assumption that this is a result of the Fable banning. As a datapoint, I did some form of KYC verification to use OpenAI's cybersecurity platform a few weeks ago.

To be clear: I still think this is an important discussion.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1smpjg8/well_iv...

Edit: truthbe above pointed out there was a privacy policy change.

Re: Identity verification on Claude

#500
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not. And by the time they are Open AI and Anthropic will probably be onto the next thing. Not sure what happened to Google in all this. They're falling out of the frontier race.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI don't want to continue training models indefinitely. Anthropic CEO has expressed potentially slowing down on model training. There is little return for billions of dollars burnt for 1-2% increase on various benchmarks. These companies profit via inference. Not to mention, the whole Fable being banned by the US Gov is a scary prospect for future models. What is the point of spending billions…

Of course this can't go on forever. Especially not on LLMs. But are we really close to the limits of what these LLMs can do? I'm not sure we are.

The difference between GPT-5/Opus 4 and GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8 is striking. For software development anyway, there's no comparison. And all this has happened in a year.

My assumption is there will be another 2-3 years of improvements ahead of us on LLMs alone. Through hardware upgrades, larger training runs, better data quality, better algorithms, etc.

Of course, by then these models will be quite expensive. Will my company pay for it? I don't know. I'm sure some people will though.

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