Anthropic has updated its privacy policy, effective July 8, to require some Claude users flagged for potential policy violations to submit government-issued IDs and selfie photos or videos for identity verification. The process generates facial geometry templates — data that qualifies as biometric information under laws like Illinois's BIPA. Verification is handled by Persona, a third-party platform backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, which has previously faced backlash from Discord users and was linked to a security incident involving government-accessible data. Anthropic says the requirement affects only a small subset of users and is unrelated to recent US government actions against its most powerful AI models, though the timing has drawn scrutiny given ongoing tensions between the company and Washington.
