Trending on X: Anthropic Now Asks Some Users for a Government ID and a Live Selfie
What Happened
Decrypt reports Anthropic has begun asking select account holders to upload government-issued IDs and complete liveness selfies before using certain features. The rollout is unannounced, geographically uneven, and disproportionately hits users in regions without modern ID infrastructure. Anthropic has not specified which capabilities are gated or how long biometrics are retained.
My Take
This is the first real preview of what "responsible AI" becomes once models approach agent autonomy — KYC for inference. The business logic is sound: identity friction is the cheapest defense against jailbreaks, fraud rings, and the model distillation Anthropic accuses Chinese labs of running at scale. But once one frontier lab normalizes biometric gating, every lab will, and the anonymous-API era ends. Enterprises should start treating verified-identity access as a procurement line item, not a privacy footnote.
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