Anthropic may ask Claude users to verify their age and identity by uploading their government-issued documents, according to a new version of the company’s privacy policy.
The AI giant says the move was to allow users to appeal having their account flagged for potentially fraudulent activity rather than outright banning them, but comes at a time when Anthropic seeks to placate the Trump administration amid an ongoing standoff over who gets access to the company’s AI tools.
According to a new section in its latest privacy policy published earlier in June and set to take effect on July 8, Anthropic says it will ask for a user to prove their age or identity “in certain circumstances,” without providing specific examples.
While Anthropic has long required users to be over 18 to use Claude, the company earlier this year introduced age-verification checks to comply with various states and countries that require them. Identity checks were also announced but weren’t reflected in the company’s privacy policy until more recently.
When triggered, the policy would require those users to upload a photo scan of a government-issued passport or driver’s license. Anthropic says it will also collect a person’s selfie photo or video and the person’s digitized version as a face geometry template (which some states, like Illinois, consider to be legally protected biometric data). Anthropic says it will also keep a record of the verification result, such as whether the user has reached a certain age.
When reached by TechCrunch, Anthropic spokesperson Michael Aciman shared a link to an X post from Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar saying that the change applies only to a “small subset of users” whose accounts are flagged but not outright banned. (Anthropic’s spokesperson would not say how many users is a subset, but the company is thought to have tens of millions of users monthly.)
“[Anthropic’s identity verification policy] was updated on June 17 as an update to the appeals process,” said Shihipar in the post. “It’s unrelated to the Fable or Mythos rollout.”
Anthropic said it is allowed to require users to upload a copy of their IDs for a number of reasons, such as for requiring users to verify themselves for creating and administering their Claude account, and enforcing its terms of service, such as to prevent and investigate fraud, abuse, and violations of its terms, including unlawful or criminal conduct, and to investigate and resolve security issues.
The move to keep closer tabs on who is using Anthropic’s AI tools may be one way for the company to comply with a variety of ongoing legal challenges, regulatory changes, and inbound pressures from the Trump administration.
The tech giant remains largely at an impasse with the White House, more than a week after Trump officials effectively forced Anthropic to pull its latest cybersecurity models over allegations that an apparent jailbreak could break the models’ guardrails. Other reports have pointed to personality clashes between the company and the Trump administration as the greater culprit of the breakdown in relations.
This latest clash comes months after the Department of Defense designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, apparently in retaliation for not allowing the government to use its technology for mass domestic surveillance or powering fully autonomous weapons.
Anthropic said it uses the San Francisco-based company Persona as its identity-checking provider and that users may “see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.”
Anthropic said that it decides how long Persona will retain its users’ identity documents, but Anthropic’s spokesperson did not immediately say when the data was deleted. (For context, Roblox, another customer of Persona, says users’ images are deleted “immediately” after they are processed, limiting the chance of the information later being leaked or stolen.)
Persona can still face U.S. government demands for users’ information that it stores on its servers.
Persona is backed by Founders Fund, an investment firm founded by Trump backer Peter Thiel, who also invests in Anthropic. The identity-checking firm has faced criticism from users for its links to Thiel. Earlier this year, Discord chose Persona for its age-verification checks, then quickly reneged following user backlash for choosing Persona.
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