Anthropic turns on age checks: flagged Claude users must prove they're 18
Three stories today, one theme: who gets trusted. Anthropic is screening its users, Moonshot is asking investors to trust its revenue curve, and California is writing the trust rules into law.
Anthropic has switched on age assurance for Claude's consumer app — anyone the safety systems flag as possibly under 18 now has to verify their age or lose the account. The company's help center spells out the mechanics: Claude stays 18-plus only, and Anthropic will "disable accounts based on indicators of minor activity." Getting back in runs through Yoti, an independently audited third-party verifier — users pick a selfie-based facial age estimate (no ID document needed) or share a verified "over 18" attribute from Yoti's digital ID app. Anthropic says it receives only a pass/fail result, and Yoti deletes the selfie and any document images as soon as the check completes. OpenAI chose teen-specific guardrails for ChatGPT last month; Anthropic's answer is blunter — cut minors off entirely, and make the flagged prove otherwise. The friction point is exactly what it sounds like: the same flag-first system swept up adult users in suspensions earlier this year, and with this design the burden of proof sits on the flagged user, not the platform.
Moonshot AI told investors its annualized revenue passed $1 billion in August — up from $300 million in June — driven by the Kimi K3 release, and the lab is targeting $2 billion by the end of 2026. That is a 3x jump in two months for the Beijing lab behind Kimi, per Bloomberg, and it arrives as Moonshot pushes a Hong Kong IPO at a reported $50 billion valuation. We covered that filing this morning — Moonshot AI files for Hong Kong IPO at $50B — days after Anthropic calls it out. The awkward part: the revenue sprint is landing in the same news cycle as Anthropic's accusation that Moonshot secretly routed user conversations through Claude. Growth and credibility now have to clear the same bar.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed another round of AI safety bills — and, unusually, both Anthropic and OpenAI backed them. Chinese coverage of the signing frames the frontier-AI assurance measure as the first of its kind in the US. Newsom argued California is leading the nation on safety, transparency and accountability, but said the technology's scale and potential consequences demand action at every level of government — and that Washington must now establish strong national regulations. The joint industry endorsement is the tell: with a dozen lab insiders calling for a slowdown and the White House dismissing extinction risk, labs would rather shape state rules than fight them. We covered the transparency act's auditor mechanism yesterday — California just made AI companies face an auditor they don't pick.
What to watch: whether more labs follow Anthropic's hard 18-plus line, and whether Moonshot's $2 billion target survives the distillation controversy's drag on enterprise buyers.
Should a lab be able to lock your account on an algorithmic age guess and put the burden of proof on you? Tell us in the comments.
