No. At least until there are actual KYC laws for LLM access in my country...
And after those laws, VPN to a free country and download local models. Never give in to the panopticon.
Claude may require identity verification in some cases
51–60 of 105 posts
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#52Anthropic says they may not train their models using your data, but apparently Persona (the service they will use for identity verification) WILL according to https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verificatio... Persona also might send your data to 17 different subprocessors (16 if you exclude Anthropic itself).
> Persona also might send your data to 17 different subprocessors You reminded me of this submission from two months ago: I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245 )
Recently a few days back, I had to verify my Linkedin identity on a new account (I am 17 for context) and I used proton mail and Linkedin immediately blocked it and asked for verification
I legally couldn't verify because persona doesn't detect aadhaar card and their support system on twitter/mail whatever was incredibly bad so much so that it felt like copy-paste and I still haven't gotten the card. I have written about my experience too.
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/linkedin/ : (Title of this is) Linkedin's "final decision", restricting my account, making me feel unheard, Persona being Persona & the time I asked Linkedin support what 351/13 is to prove if they are human or not.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#53I figured they already have your identity via the payment process. Not like you can do anything (risky or not) via the free tier.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qwen3 runs locally on reasonable hardware, and is comparable to a mid-2025 Claude Sonnet (albeit possibly rather slower) . Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard. So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV) edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)
Whats "reasonable hardware"?
A machine with 128GB of unified system RAM will run reasonable-fidelity quantizations (4-bit or more).
If you ever want to answer this type of question yourself, you can look at the size of the model files. Loading a model usually uses an amount of RAM around the size it occupies on disk, plus a few gigabytes for the context window.
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is 120GB. Quantized to 4 bits it is ~70GB. You can run a 70GB model in 80GB of VRAM or 128GB of unified normal RAM.
Systems with that capability cost a small number of thousand USD to purchase new.
If you are willing to sacrifice some performance, you can take advantage of the model being a mixture-of-experts and use disk space to get by with less RAM/VRAM, but inference speed will suffer.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#55Why do companies keep working with Persona even though they have proven time and time again to be untrustworthy?
>untrustworthy
For the user, sure. But for companies and governments? I'm pretty sure Person is quite trustworthy.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Qwen3 runs locally on reasonable hardware, and is comparable to a mid-2025 Claude Sonnet (albeit possibly rather slower) . Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard. So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV) edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)
Whats "reasonable hardware"?
People have tried to run Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on 4x $600 used, Nvidia 3090s with 24 GB of VRAM each (96 GB total), and while it runs, it is too slow for production grade (You can quantize it of course, but if the idea is "as close to Sonnet as possible," then while quantized models are objectively more efficient they are sacrificing precision for it.
So next step is to up that speed, so we're at 4x $1300, Nvidia 5090s with 32 GB of VRAM each (128 GB), or $5,200 before RAM/CPU/etc. All of this additional cost to increase your tokens/second without lobotomizing the model. This still may not be enough.
I guess my point is: You see this conversation a LOT online. "Qwen3 can be near Sonnet!" but then when asked how, instead of giving you an answer for the true "near Sonnet" model per benchmarks, they suddenly start talking about a substantially inferior Qwen3 model that is cheap to run at home (e.g. 27B/30B quantized down to Q4/Q5).
The local models absolutely DO exist that are "near Sonnet." The hardware to actually run them is the bottleneck, and it is a HUGE financial/practical bottleneck. If you had a $10K all-in budget, it isn't actually insane for this class of model, and the sky really is the limit (again to reduce quantization and or increase tokens/second).
PS - And electricity costs are non-trivial for 4x 3090s or 4x 5090s.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#57This is deranged. Say you wanted to use AI to prepare whistleblowing submission to use regulatory language and test for any weak points. Then Claude flags it and requires you to identify yourself. It's not a stretch of imagination that before you manage to send the bundle, you find yourself in the suitcase somewhere in the woods. People explore all kinds of sensitive stuff and I see it is tempting for AI companies to…
>Say you wanted to use AI to prepare whistleblowing submission to use regulatory language and test for any weak points.
Why would you do this? If you can't write it yourself, you're just sabotaging your effort once the hallucinations are revealed. Secondly, a whistleblower is going to use a corporate LLM provider? Even without ID checks, that's an extremely uncompensated risk.
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#58It's worrying that they don't specify in which cases they require identity checks.
Basically the only relevant question, and it's the one they didn't answer
An equally valid question is "does the company you use for identify verification follow the same commitments with regards user privacy and selling/processing of user data as Anthropic itself?".
And the answer to that question is:
"Hell no! We used the cheapest, shadiest company we could find for that. They'll process and sell all your data. Thank you for continuing to be a valued Anthropic customer!".
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#59Why is this necessary if I'm paying Anthropic with a credit card? A credit card requires a) credit worthiness, b) a line of credit from a bank based on the individual's identity, and c) regular payments. Why isn't a credit card enough? Why can't certain features be paywalled? If someone is doing something deeply unethical with Claude, let's say they're using a clade of Claudes to launch cyberattacks, then doesn't Ant…
Persona collects far more info on you than a name and credit card number. There are also some obfuscation services for cards (will it reject a prepaid debit card?), which would require them to go through extra steps to get your actual identity.
>I don't understand why Anthropic would expose themselves to the liability; when arguably they have all the tools baked right in.
What liability? When has a company ever faced any significant penalty for irresponsibly handling people's private data?
Re: Claude may require identity verification in some cases
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can guess at least one valid: * preventing North Korea, China, Russian, Iran and etc. actors from accessing service. They absolutely use workarounds to access AI, e.g. I bet there are companies who are proxy between Anthropic and those countries. I imagine there will be quite some false positives while identifying those.
This will do absolutely nothing to prevent those actors from accessing Claude... they already recruit young unemployed Americans to do proxy job interviews[0][1], etc. They'll just pay young unemployed Americans to do verification for them. [0] https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:6192f38e3094b... [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=QebpXFM1ha0
That sounds likely to increase their costs and create new opportunities to get caught. Not a silver bullet but not "absolutely nothing". Like how anti-money laundering laws don't wipe out all crime, but are still worthwhile.