I can’t believe Anthropic is actually doing age verification for new accounts … yet, … I can? This company seems to have the most brain-dead leadership I’ve seen, maybe ever.
Something is wrong in the halls of Anthropic. There’s a mind virus, something warping the thoughts of the people within.
Age verification isn’t required by any government mandate (yet), but here we are. And this is after Anthropic completely nerfed their models,
For me, it’s the last straw. I have no doubts how they will use this information, any chats that I give to them. And it will be leaked – ALL OF ANTHROPIC’S USERS’ CHATS will be leaked / hacked one day! There is no privacy.
This has nothing to do w/their leadership’s fears of AI or AGI, this is just b/c they’re completely incompetent.
Anyway, for me the trust started to erode when they started to block 3rd-party clients from using their subscriptions. Which is their right, but it’s still a crappy thing to do. But now, seeing it thru the “OMG we have to control everything for the safety of the world!” hysterical lens, it starts to make a lot more sense.
I thought I’d press on past the OpenCode issues, b/c others had written plugins to avoid this and still use it w/the subscription. And the models were good. Opus 4.6 (~Feb-early March timeframe) is the best model I’ve ever used. It literally 1-shotted so many things, and the 1m context window meant that I’m not compacting every time my sessions get close to around 80k tokens.
Someone Anthropic found ways around even that, and now I can’t even use Opus to it’s full measure, even with max reasoning set. It’s like having a thing, a wonderful new technology that’s going to change the world, and all of that just taken away.
So at this point… why stay w/Anthropic? I downgraded from the $100 / month to the $20 / month plan. But now I don’t even see the point of that.
Only reason would be the session history, but I’ve been able to export that (also, they somehow set the dates for many chats incorrectly to mid 2024 dates, even though I remember starting them just a few weeks ago, well into 2026. This I just chalk up to incompetence, similar to their inability to get Google OAuth login working after you’ve changed your email address associated w/that Google Workspace account. They try and match on the email address instead of the Google account ID, and it fails. Even OpenAI got that right. Incompetence.
And, you can’t change your email w/an Anthropic account. People lose email addresses or cycle them all the time. Nope, not w/Anthropic. Incompetence.
Incompetent design (this was some product manager’s decision), incompetent leadership.
Ok so aside from hating on Anthropic b/c the suck and fully deserve it, the bigger trend here is that governments will eventually start to required ID verification for accounts. All your chats are belong to them. Governments, and big data companies like Anthropic. Now they’re big data, the product is nerfed anyway. YOU are the product. No thanks.
Balaji predicted this months ago, maybe even longer. He basically said that soon it will be “red + blue vs tech”. Highlighting how in the 2010s and early 2020s it was blue + tech vs red, then now in the mid-2020s it’s red+tech vs blue, and soon this dystopian nightmare.
Kraken has sent me this AI-enabled form w/all kinds of information about trades, etc. and Cointracker, etc. can trace anything I’ve done or any funds I’ve ever held, thru the public blockchains. The public blockchains.
There is a private one. There might be others, but Zcash is the only major L1 blockchain where funds are provably there, yet can’t be seen (shielded pools). Also, it’s the only major L1 that I’m aware of that has a solid, active post-quantum roadmap and with the ability for funds to be quantum-secure today as long as they are shielded, in the orchard pool.
From now and moving forward, we need to be privacymaxxing, because the dystopian future is right around the corner. I don’t want to be part of it.
I don’t want any government insist I pay them a certain portion of my income or they’ll point a gun at me and throw me in a box.
I don’t want them or anyone knowing how much I even have, my transaction history, where I shop, where I eat, what I buy. It’s fucking dystopian, and it should not exist.
From now on, every device I or my family owns will have one or multiple VPN clients. We will have multiple providers, and a shared password manager where everyone knows what they are, how to access them, how to run them, and the consequences of not doing so.
We encrypt our cloud storage with post-quantum encryption using only keys which we hold ourselves, not trusting in things like HSMs within AWS (“trust me, bro” security).
I’ve worked in cybersecurity for years, I passed the CISSP test waaaaaayy back in 2009. I’ve also worked in crypto, having been a major contributor to Dash and Dash Core Group during the 2016-2020 years, and a little bit more thereafter to a lesser extent.
I was drawn to crypto b/c I saw amazing potential in the nature of a currency which can’t be seized by the government, any government..
Though I didn’t do drugs at the time,
I found the concept of the Silk Road fascinating back in 2012, and this is what led me to buy my first Bitcoins. Because it was something the government couldn’t stop. I could send any amount of money (that I possess), anywhere in the world, to anyone. Can’t be stopped. Fucking amazing. And immediate, direct. I actually owned my own money.
Then it got popular, then wrench attacks started happening. Even with hardware wallets, it doesn’t stop wrench attacks.
But what can’t be seen can’t be known. And now w/the ubiquitousness of AI, anyone can build a system to scrape together a dossier of you and all your transactions you’ve ever made, live on the public blockchain. Ever used Coinbase, Kraken, or even Binance after 2021? You’re KYC’d and any transaction you’ve done has given the US government eyes on anything you’ve done on the blockchain reaching back (and forward) to forever.
I deeply understand the need for privacy.
Use a VPN, get one on all your devices.
Stop using Anthropic and OpenAI, use Venice.AI, ideally with DIEM tokens if you can afford it.
Store your wealth in Shielded Zcash, use Zodl.
zk all the things. PQ-encrypt all the things that you can’t.
The dystopian future from 1984 is coming, prepare yourself, for you and your family. On the other side of the legacy nation state, there is light and a bright future.
Privacy is a prerequisite to freedom. Let’s be freedommaxxing, for the sake of the world and our children, and humanity’s bright future ahead.\