Category: #Ethics

Anthropic is introducing identity verification on its AI chatbot platform Claude for a “small number of cases.” For its verification provider, the company has chosen Persona, which also supplies biometric age verification for ChatGPT and facial age estimation for Roblox.

The verification process will include submitting a government-issued photo ID and a selfie for biometric matching and liveness detection. Anthropic says that the verification process will be initiated when users are “accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.”

“This applies to a small number of cases where we see activity that indicates potentially fraudulent or abusive behavior, which violates our usage policy,” a company spokesperson told Business Insider.

Claude users do not seem happy about the possibility of sharing their identity data with Persona, a problem the company also faced recently in a failed attempt to bring the technology to Discord. When the messaging platform announced tests with Persona’s age assurance in February, its users quickly drew attention to the fact that Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel is an investor in the IDV firm through his Founders Fund.​

A cybersecurity investigation then exposed an uncompressed version of Persona’s frontend code on U.S. government-authorized servers, raising further suspicions.

​Persona responded by fixing the issue and describing concerns from Discord users as “conspiracies.” The U.S.-based company said it does not work with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which rely on Palantir’s surveillance technology.

Discord, on its side, apologized for not explaining the testing to its users and announced it was not moving forward with age checks through Persona.

In its newest update, Anthropic explains that it will remain the data controller for user verification data on Claude, but the IDs and selfies will be collected by Persona, which is contractually limited in how it can use the data. All data passing through Persona is encrypted, while the platform will only provide verification and  improve its ability to prevent fraud.

Anthropic also reassured customers that their identity data and biometrics will not be used to train the company’s AI models or shared with anyone else.