Anthropic updated its privacy policy earlier this month, including a new clause stipulating that Claude users would be required to verify their age or identity “in certain circumstances” by uploading an image of a government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, and it didn’t take long for the outrage machine and rumor mill to start churning. Some people claimed the new age-verification requirement was the harbinger of a dark new era for the internet, one in which anyone hoping to access a particular service must first prove their identity to one of the major tech giants, all of whom would serve effectively as digital bouncers. Such worries were stoked by Anthropic’s tapping of Peter Thiel-backed software company Persona Identities to build out its age-verification mechanisms. Persona sparked a controversy earlier this year after researchers found the company had been checking users’ private biometric data against government watchlists, prompting Discord to scrap its own plan to implement age-verification measures in partnership with the company. Persona’s roster of current partners includes OpenAI, Lyft, Square, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, others speculated that Anthropic’s new age-verification requirement could enable the company to keep tabs on its users following a recent order from the Trump administration to cut off access to its newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to all foreign nationals both inside and outside the U.S. The argument there is that if it chose to, Anthropic could appease the government by granting access only to users who are able to prove their U.S. citizenship.