Anthropic has rolled out identity verification on Claude as a measure to prevent abuse, enforce usage policies, and comply with legal obligations. As part of the roll out, the AI company is asking select users to hand over a government-issued photo ID and a live selfie when accessing Claude. “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,” Anthropic said. “We only use your verification data to confirm who you are and not for any other purposes,” it added.
ID verification comes to Claude: Accepted IDs
As listed on its official support page, Anthropic is accepting physical government-issued photo IDs from most countries. Common examples include:
- Passport
- Driver’s license or state/provincial ID card
- National identity card
“Your ID must be issued by a government, clearly legible, undamaged, and include a photo of you,” the company says. IDs that are not accepted are:
- Photocopies, screenshots, scans, or photos of a photo
- Digital or mobile IDs (such as mobile driver’s licenses)
- Non-government IDs: student IDs, employee badges, library cards, bank cards
- Temporary paper IDs
Not using your identity data to train models: Anthropic
Anthropic assures users that verification data is “used solely to confirm who you are and to meet our legal and safety obligations.” “We are not collecting more than we need. We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity,” it says.“Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we’re legally required to respond to valid legal processes. Your verification data is never shared with third parties for marketing, advertising, or any purpose unrelated to verification and compliance,” the company adds.
Users criticize Anthropic’s ID verification
Coming weeks after millions joined Claude specifically over OpenAI’s surveillance deal, the ID verification requirement to use claude has not gone well with Anthropic users. X user Kai @hqmank wrote in a post: “Claude now requires government ID verification (via Persona) before subscription.ChatGPT doesn’t.Gemini doesn’t.Anthropic just handed their competitors a gift.”“didnt just add KYC, they collapsed the boundary between identity and thought. once access to intelligence is gated by who you are, it stops being a tool and starts being infrastructure for control,” said another user. “This is a bad move for what reason did they do this? I was JUST going to reup on a pro plan…I may just go with Super Grok for now as I already have Gemini Pro,” said a third.
