Overview
- Anthropic will begin identity verification for a small, flagged subset of Claude users on July 8, 2026, offering those accounts a chance to keep access if they complete the check.
- The company has contracted Persona Identities to perform the checks and says verification data will not be used to train its models and will only be shared with the vendor.
- Privacy critics have flagged Persona’s investor ties, including to Peter Thiel, and raised alarms that Anthropic’s retention of some ID data departs from industry practices of immediate deletion.
- Anthropic is also negotiating with U.S. regulators after the government ordered global limits on access to its high-capability Mythos/Fable models in mid‑June, restricting use to U.S. citizens.
- The company alleges a large-scale 'distillation' campaign linked to Alibaba used about 25,000 fake accounts for nearly 29 million interactions and has asked U.S. lawmakers for legal and technical steps to curb such extraction attacks.