Before the furor over the decision to disable the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, Anthropic quietly updated its privacy policy to say it may check users' identities if it believes it's necessary.

The new terminology allows Anthropic to perform age and identity verification on consumer users. The change, scheduled to take effect on July 8th, signals a tighter security and compliance stance across Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans.

“In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity,” the company's latest privacy policy explains.

Anthropic states that it may ask users to verify their age or identity to help keep its services “safe and secure.”

The policy doesn’t say what exactly will trigger an ID check. But the change actually comes in handy because, for the US government, uncertainty about users' identities seems to have been one of the motives for issuing export controls on Anthropic’s new frontier AI models.

The company was forced to take Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline to comply with a government export control order that suspended foreign access to the models, including for foreign employees.

Now, if they somehow resolve the dispute with the White House, Anthropic will be able to demonstrate a willingness to thoroughly check user identities if suspicion arises.

Howard Lutnick, the US Commerce Secretary, apparently told Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the government took action due to fears that American AI models could be deployed by military intelligence users in China, Russia, or other countries of concern.

Anthropic has spoken in the recent past about the threat posed by foreign rivals that copy its models through a process called distillation.

Of course, the move could simply be related to the global proliferation of digital safety laws designed to protect children from online harms.

Some legislation explicitly targets AI chatbots, found in multiple investigations to have at least partly contributed to teenage suicides.

“Data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold),” Anthropic says.

The policy doesn’t apply to commercial Team, Enterprise, and API customers. Anthropic doesn’t detail the consequences of non-compliance.

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