Claude may soon ask to see your ID.
Anthropic recently added “identity verification” to its safeguards, requiring some users to provide a passport, driver’s license, or government ID, along with a live selfie. The company is rolling it out for “a few use cases,” according to its Help Center.
Anthropic says it’s the “data controller,” setting the rules for where ID data is used and how long it is kept. But Persona Identities, an ID verification startup, will collect and store the user information.
Persona is contractually obligated to employ user data “only to provide and support verification and to improve their ability to prevent fraud,” Anthropic said.
So why is Anthropic asking some Claude users to prove who they are?
“This applies to a small number of cases where we see activity that indicates potentially fraudulent or abusive behavior, which violates our usage policy,” an Anthropic spokesperson wrote to Business Insider.
If Anthropic deems that the activity violates its usage policy, the Claude user’s account could be banned.
Anthropic’s help page lists the following potential reasons for why an account might be banned after completing ID verification:
- Repeated violations of our Usage Policy
- Account creation from an unsupported location
- Terms of Service violations
- Under-18 usage
Anthropic also offers an appeals form that can be filled out if a user feels their account has been wrongfully banned.
Claude users bristle at the idea of ID checks
Claude users on X have already started noticing the requests for an ID. One user posted a screenshot of the request in Claude, which asked for a “quick identity check.” It wrote that the request would only take two minutes and required an ID and mobile camera access.
Another screenshot posted online shows what it looks like once the process is completed. “Thank you for verifying your identity,” it wrote, accompanied by a celebratory graphic.
The backlash on X was swift. “Anthropic making unexplainable decisions,” one user wrote. “We are living in 1984,” another wrote.
In its Help Center, Anthropic also included a list of things it was not doing. Anthropic was not training its models on the data from ID verifications, it wrote. It also wrote that it wasn’t sharing ID data with anyone beyond Anthropic and Persona, except where legally required.
“We are not collecting more than we need,” Anthropic wrote. “We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity.”
