Anthropic is preparing to ask some Claude users to upload a government-issued ID or take a selfie to verify their identity. The change is buried in a new version of the company’s privacy policy, published in mid-June and set to take effect on July 8. According to TechCrunch, the move applies to users whose accounts have been flagged for potentially fraudulent activity rather than immediately banned.
Anthropic spokesperson Michael Aciman pointed to an X post from Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar, who described the policy update as a change to the company’s appeals process. “It’s unrelated to the Fable or Mythos rollout,” Shihipar wrote. The company did not say how many users have been flagged, though Claude is believed to have tens of millions of monthly users.
The timing is notable. Anthropic is in the middle of a rocky relationship with the Trump administration, and this shift toward tighter identity controls adds another layer to an already complicated story.
When a verification check is triggered, users would need to provide:
- A photo scan of a government-issued passport or driver’s license
- A selfie photo or video
- A face geometry template, which some states such as Illinois legally classify as protected biometric data
- A record of the verification result, such as age confirmation
Anthropic has required users to be over 18 for some time. Earlier this year, it added age-verification checks to meet requirements in various U.S. states and countries. Identity verification was also introduced around that time, but only recently made it into the company’s official privacy policy.
Anthropic says it may require ID for several reasons, including verifying accounts, enforcing its terms of service, investigating fraud, and addressing security issues. The company is using San Francisco-based identity-checking firm Persona to handle the process. Users “may see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures,” Anthropic said.
One open question is how long that data stays on Persona’s servers. Anthropic says it decides the retention period, but its spokesperson did not give a specific answer on when documents are deleted. That matters because Persona is subject to U.S. government data requests. For comparison, Roblox, another Persona customer, says user images are deleted immediately after processing.
Persona’s investor ties add another dimension to the story. The firm is backed by Founders Fund, the investment firm started by Peter Thiel, who also has stakes in Anthropic. Thiel is a well-known Trump supporter, and Persona has faced criticism from privacy-conscious users because of that connection. Discord chose Persona for its own age-verification rollout earlier this year, then reversed course after significant user backlash.
The broader context here is hard to ignore. Anthropic has been at odds with the White House for months. Trump officials reportedly pushed the company to pull its latest cybersecurity models after claims that a jailbreak could bypass the models’ safety controls. Before that, the Department of Defense designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” reportedly because the company refused to allow the government to use its technology for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Reports have also pointed to personal friction between Anthropic leadership and Trump administration officials as a contributing factor.
Whether the ID verification policy is a direct response to that pressure or genuinely just a fraud-prevention update is impossible to say definitively. But the timing, the political backdrop, and the choice of vendor mean this change is likely to get far more scrutiny than a routine privacy policy update normally would.
