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Claude is only available to people over 18 years

support.claude.com

301–310 of 625 posts

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#301
post #83

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.

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.

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

Unviable. Learning how to create the universe is provably an insurmountable challenge for the vast majority of people. They require higher level abstractions to be able to learn. Once they understand the high level abstraction they will learn some things about what lies beneath the abstraction, but it is ineffective to start with the low levels. Understanding the fundamentals is best left as an emergent property of the process, not the process itself.

The good news is that the high level abstractions we all used a couple of years ago do not require LLMs and are still widely available, so it is not like anyone is going to be left completely out in the cold, but at the same time denying the state of the art abstractions is needlessly limiting.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#302

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…

California passed a law AB-1043 that requires every OS developer to add age verification on the OS level.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.

That's a silly reply. Imagine telling a kid to chisel what they want out of the marble line by line with a straight face when they can clearly see people appearing entire programs into existence in minutes.

My first language was RISC Assembly, and it greatly simplified understanding how computers function.

There was no Internet, but rather books in a place called a Library with something called informative context. =3

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#304
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are just better pattern matchers

That’s pretty much the heart of conspiracy theories and paranoia, yes. See apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Yes, except these kinds of fears related to big tech/surveillance end up being true more often than not. Unsurprising given the profit incentives and the total lack of ethics in the industry.

10+ years ago you were considered a lunatic if you told people that putting internet-connected cameras and microphones everywhere is a bad idea because their TV would be used to spy on them, that their cameras would be accessed by the police without their consent for surveillance, or that car company employees would watch them walk around naked through the cameras on their car.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#306

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…

More interesting dialogue was between the Claude Executive and a government official just before this one.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#307
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children. Can you fathom that childhood is only tiny part of everyone life, and negative…

Sure, but for all that short duration, childhood age is foundational and happens to effectively guide just about everything that follows;p

Of course, but it's also, with teenage years, the best years to learn tools.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#308
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from a trusted party like a bank. For what reason should I trust a bank?

Not "a" bank. You (somewhat) trust your bank, I would imagine. Since you know, they have your money. GP's hypothetical here is that Anthropic or other service provider who wants to do "age verification" could partner with (among others) your bank [1], where bank can answer yes/no to "is this user >= 18?", without revealing any other personal info to the SP. Allegedly. [1] via an intermediary, no doubt. Trying to do a…

> You (somewhat) trust your bank

For what reason?

> Since you know, they have your money.

You may trust them with your money, but does not equate to trusting them with anything else. Principle of least privilege, if you will. Anthropic has your chat data, which in many ways is more valuable than money, so if the only bar for free lying giving out your personal details is trusting a business with something of yours then why bother with this complex scheme and give Anthropic all of your personal information directly?

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#309
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The future I dread is one where kids don't learn and just defer everything to AI. That puts so much power into the hands of the AI companies.

It is similar to the WWW, and simply even to books (to company etc.): some people will use the available for cultivation, many for entertainment.

Whether the kid will be prepared to do the right thing, to prefer the better choice, remains a societal (family, school etc.) task.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#310
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult. That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult. For…

The impact on ‘minors’ is even greater. In first year university I was 17. Imagine being that person today: 90% of the class can use LLMs, but you can't.

Then you are in the lucky 10% whose brains arent't fried. LLMs are like television.
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