Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude is only available to people over 18 years

support.claude.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 616 posts

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#581

Post by win311fwg »

dpkirchner wrote: post #532
win311fwg wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how do you expect a website to know that you are 18+? The technical solution offered earlier was to have a trusted third-party only be willing to answer the "is this person 18+?" question. Of course, the same works for banks. The trusted third-party can answer "does this person own this account?" without needing to reveal to the bank any other information about you. Now, that still leaves open the question of w…

> Now, that still leaves open the question of who you can trust. If you can trust a business run by people then that allows you to trust a bank, sure, but it also allows you to trust a tech company Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is or ever will be (IMO, I could end up surprised). I trust my bank to know who I am and keep track of my money. I trust big tech to lose or misinterpret…

> Banks are subject to much stricter regulation than any tech company is

That's true, but remember what we're talking about: Using banks (or another trusted third-party) to assert your age instead of having big tech collecting your personal information themselves. There is context here. Writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense.

In that context it is understood that only incentive for big tech to follow the proposed is regulation, but if you are going to push regulation on them then you can regulate them just as much as banks.

Your broader point that, in the real world, there isn't much political will to push any of that regulation is also no doubt true, but, again, writing comments in a vacuum makes no sense. The hypothetical of big tech adopting a third-party attestation system was already understood to be just that: hypothetical.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#582

Post by pishpash »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #570
tangotaylor wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#583

Post by Dylan16807 »

kouteiheika wrote: post #257
ACCount37 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line". They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.

> They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests. I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply: On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been…

I know people like to instantly flag copied AI text but it's actually serving a point here, so I'm vouching at least.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#584

Post by sajithdilshan »

mpalmer wrote: post #571
xacky wrote: post #495

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.

Good, the less capable they are, the more students will actually have to learn.

While they are at it maybe should learn to count with an abacus and send letters via pigeons

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#585

Post by pishpash »

Valodim wrote: post #238
mayhemducks wrote: post #195

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 co…

> 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.

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?

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#586

Post by feoren »

alt227 wrote: post #499
siddthesquid wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#587

Post by Dylan16807 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #387
CrazyStat wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would still have to be made by humans. There is precedent for such a system, e.g. minors can petition to be emancipated which allows them to be treated…

> perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. Yes, that is what I meant. Choosing some arbitrary magic number like 18 and declaring that anyone under that age is too dumb or too irresponsible to decide is about as stupid as declaring that anyone over 65 is incapable of decision making because they might have Alzheimer's.

99% of people are probably going to use the high school diploma route and not the demonstration route, so that's basically age with extra steps.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#588

Post by epolanski »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #575
lelanthran wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands. I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?

The problem isn't the goal, it's using vast money reserves to sell at a loss and hamper competition.

Somebody tell the Chinese companies to stop dumping AI, so US labs can keep burning pension funds money wrapped in VC checks fine dumping AI at a huge loss.

In any case I find the dumping argument stupid: they are giving both the model weights away and publishing in the open their results and how they got there.

Re: Claude is only available to people over 18 years

#590

Post by epolanski »

00deadbeef wrote: post #351
ssijak wrote: post #172

So we get actual mega useful tech banned for minors before we get ultimate useless brain damaging tech (social networks) banned for minors.

What makes you think AI isn’t damaging for kids? Teaching them to outsource their thinking to AI can’t be a good thing.

I find both arguments asinine: why would socials for adults or outsourcing thinking by adults be good?
Post reply on HN