Anthropic may ask Claude users to verify their age and identity by uploading government-issued documents, according to a new version of the company's privacy policy.
The AI giant said the move was not to ban accounts outright, but rather to allow users to dispute having their accounts flagged for potentially fraudulent activity, and comes at a time when Anthropic is trying to appease the Trump administration amid an ongoing standoff over who gets access to its AI tools.
In a new section of its updated privacy policy, published in early June and set to go into effect on July 8, Anthropic says it will ask users to prove their age or identity “in certain circumstances,” without providing specific examples.
Anthropic has long required users to be at least 18 to use Claude, but the company introduced age verification checks earlier this year to comply with various states and countries that require age verification. Identity verification was also announced, but it was not reflected in the company's privacy policy until recently.
Once the policy is activated, these users will be required to upload a scanned photo of their government-issued passport or driver's license. Anthropic says it will collect a person's selfie or video and a digitized version of that person as a facial geometry template (which some states, including Illinois, consider legally protected biometric data). Anthropic also says it will keep records of verification results, such as whether users are of a certain age.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Anthropic spokesperson Michael Aciman shared a link to an X post from Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar and said the change only applies to a “small number of users” whose accounts have been flagged but not outright banned. (A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to say how many users that subset is, but the company is believed to have tens of millions of users each month.)
“[Anthropic’s identity verification policy] “This was updated on June 17th as an update on the appeals process. This is unrelated to developments in Fable or Mythos,” Schichper said in the post.
Anthropic said it is permitted to require users to upload a copy of their ID for a variety of reasons, including requiring users to verify their identity to create and manage a Claude account, and enforcing the Terms of Service, including to prevent and investigate violations of the Terms, including fraud, abuse, illegal and criminal activity, and to investigate and resolve security issues.
Anthropic's move to more closely monitor who is using its AI tools could be one way for the company to comply with a variety of ongoing legal challenges, regulatory changes, and external pressure from the Trump administration.
More than a week after Trump officials effectively forced Anthropic to scrap its latest cybersecurity model over allegations that an apparent jailbreak could breach the model's guardrails, the tech giant remains at a near deadlock in negotiations with the White House. Other reports have pointed to personality differences between the company and the Trump administration as the biggest reason for the breakdown in relations.
This latest conflict comes months after the Pentagon designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” apparently in retaliation for the government's refusal to allow Anthropic's technology to be used for domestic mass surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons.
Anthropic said it uses San Francisco-based company Persona as its identity verification provider and that users may “see verification prompts when accessing certain features as part of periodic platform integrity checks and other safety and compliance measures.”
Anthropic said the company determines how long Persona retains a user's identity, but an Anthropic spokesperson did not immediately say when the data was deleted. (For context, Roblox, another Persona customer, says that users' images are deleted “immediately” after processing, limiting the possibility of information being leaked or stolen later.)
Persona could still face U.S. government requests for the user information it stores on its servers.
Persona is backed by Founders Fund, an investment firm founded by Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who also invested in Anthropic. The background testing company has faced criticism from users over its ties to Teal. Earlier this year, Discord chose Persona for age verification checks, but quickly backed away from it after user backlash against the Persona choice.
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