The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?
Claude is only available to people over 18 years
41–50 of 619 posts
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#42Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC? At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.
Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?
And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#43The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.
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.
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Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#44(May)
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#45Good 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?
I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do !!" articles in the media.
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Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#46Good 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?
I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.
Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#47I 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?)
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#48Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#49Claude 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 parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.
Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.
For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.
Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.
Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children. Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.
And parents are assumed to be responsible for their own children, not governments or corporations.