In case you haven't been paying attention there has been a growing trend of age verification laws in the name of child protection, where you have to verify your identity via a selfie and screenshot of your ID to prove your identity; before you can browse a website. The justification is always the same.

"We must protect the children."

The moment anyone raises concerns about privacy, surveillance, or civil liberties, they are immediately forced into a defensive position.

"What, don't you care about children's safety?"

It's a rhetorical trap that works because it conflates two entirely different questions. The first question is whether children should be protected online. The answer is obviously yes.

The second question is whether every citizen should be forced to surrender their identity in order to access digital services. That answer is obviously no. Yet somehow these two questions are increasingly being treated as if they are one and the same.

Coupled with the proposed bans on social media for u16s in the UK and elsewhere in the EU; it does seem too coincidental that states that can hardly agree on anything suddenly wake up and converge on this one issue. I don't know about you but this kind of reminds me of the covid era where govts globally all moved in lockstep to impose lockdowns, social distancing and mandatory masking. Measures which did absolutely nothing to 'stop the spread' but which did a lot by way of economic destruction.

Now it seems the age verification bug has now slowly crept into the AI space. Anthropic, after recently having had their Fable 5 model put on ice by the DoD for national security reasons, recently joined the train of age verification. In a blog post released this week they said;

"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."

They can't seem to get enough of the fumbles. First their CEO begged the state to regulate him harder, which then resulted in Fable 5's suspension but the suspicious side of me is leaning more towards the fact that KYC was always the end goal. It was never about any dangers posed by fable 5. Now they are the first AI company that I know of that is pushing KYC for accessing their services. Whilst, they do say it's limited to specific capabilities and models, what are the odds that this trend will continue expanding gradually over time until even the free user is affected?

This is definitely one of the biggest privacy violations of our time yet, most are quiet because they believe it does keep the children safe and nothing more. A time is coming where using your own pc at home will be impossible without verifying your identity, and it will be normalized the same way KYC'ing before being given access to banking services. Instead of governments having to justify why they need your personal information, citizens are increasingly expected to justify why they deserve privacy.

What's even more concerning is that as people are getting more reliant on these tools, they will be more than happy to oblige with Anthropic's request, despite their inner objections that require justice to be done. Just like how people took the clot shots during covid to save their jobs.

How long before OpenAI, xAI, and others follow suit? Only time will tell, but the one thing that is clear is that more open source models are needed like yesterday! While I don't foresee the Chinese imposing this same requirement before accessing their models which would be good for them if they do it that way, but that's not a winning strategy where hope alone is the whole game plan.

Furthermore, KYC to use AI also means unfettered surveillance by the state as they will be able to pair your real identity to your digital footprint. This is a real regression of monumental proportions from what the internet was supposed to be. Coupled with the increasing calls from many sectors of SV including from the likes of vc Chamath Pahalpatiya to nationalize AI, is AI going to end up like nuclear technology? Where centralisation in the hands of the state then leads to stagnation and ultimately restricted access for the average Joe?

Is this how the "AI is taking over the jobs" narrative will be made real? I most certainly think so, but the starting point will be the gradual KYC rollout for using the internet and specific sites until the whole net is caged.