Anthropic locks Claude to 18+, adds Yoti age checks for flagged accounts

Anthropic has formalized an age floor for its consumer Claude product: only users 18 and older are permitted. New accounts must self-attest to being an adult at signup, but the policy goes further than a checkbox. Automated safety systems watch for behavioral signals suggesting a user may be a minor, and accounts flagged this way are disabled pending verification.

Users who get flagged can restore access through Yoti, a third-party age-verification vendor, via a link sent by email. Yoti offers three paths: facial age estimation from a selfie, uploading a government ID (passport, driver’s license, or national ID), or sharing a pre-verified ‘over 18’ attribute from the Yoti Digital ID app. Passing any of these reinstates the account.

On data handling, Anthropic emphasizes a firewall between itself and the verification process: Yoti is SOC2-audited and deletes selfies, document images, and other personal data once the age check completes, while Anthropic says it receives only a pass/fail result and never sees the underlying ID or image. The move mirrors a broader industry and regulatory push toward age assurance for online services, and raises the familiar tension between minor-safety mandates and the privacy costs of biometric or document-based identity checks.