The health of Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.
Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.
The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale. At the same time it allows companies to collect a huge amount of biometric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected.
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?
lol
If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
No, capitalism must be fed.
Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.
I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.
Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care
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 platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach
Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!
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.
I know this isn't what you meant, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a parent consenting: "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data"
As to your actual point, yes, I assume they are trying to reduce liability, especially if they're gearing up to an IPO.
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.
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?
Never using Claude just to spite the ad campaign
Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.
We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.
Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???
Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.
Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!
Thanks
lol that’ll work
Hence, if mandatory workplace use of AI inflicts harm, then I could imagine things playing out similarly. The damage slowly accumulates, may or may not be noticed in time, becomes difficult to pin down on a past employer, and when you finally realize you need to sue for damages, both the employer responsible and the system are rigged to drag out the process until you're hopefully old and dead before you have a chance to win your case.
...oh.
Abt protecting minors:
19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.
Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.
Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.
Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.
...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.
(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...
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.
The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:
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.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors
If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.
But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways.
Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.
I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:
1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever. No newspapers. No television. No radio. No internet.
2. You're a child under the age of six.
3. You're an LLM.
I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.
> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?
It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.
When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.
This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.
You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.
No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.
Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.
I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.
I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.
Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.
I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.
There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.
Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them.
For non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.
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