Anthropic is requiring a “valid government-issued photo ID” for some users, a new support document reveals:

We are rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and you might see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures. […]

We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguards. Follow the steps below to complete your identity verification process.

Persona is funded by Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir, which supports ICE raids and detentions.

Via Implicator.ai, where Harkaram Grewal notes:

The change lands less than two months after Claude drew a surge of users from OpenAI’s ChatGPT during Anthropic’s public fight with the Pentagon over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Anthropic claims:

This applies to a small number of cases where we see activity that indicates potentially fraudulent or abusive behavior, which is against our usage policy.

An identity verification prompt would be a hard pass for me, and I’m guessing many others. This is a surefire way to kill Claude. What is Anthropic thinking?