Anthropic has added an identity verification requirement for access to certain Claude capabilities, handled through a mobile flow run by third-party vendor Persona. Users flagged for verification are asked to submit a government-issued photo ID and a live selfie, with Persona performing the document and liveness checks end-to-end.
The flow, described in a Claude help center article published this week, accepts passports, driver’s licenses, and national identity cards. Student IDs, employee badges, and other unofficial credentials are rejected. The selfie capture is designed to confirm that the person presenting the document is the same person holding the account, a pattern used across financial onboarding and age-gated services.
Anthropic states that Persona collects, processes, and stores the verification artifacts. Anthropic accesses Persona’s records only through the vendor’s platform, for example during account appeals, and does not copy the images or documents onto its own infrastructure. Anthropic also says the submitted identity data is not used to train Claude models, and that Persona is contractually limited to using the data for verification and fraud-prevention purposes.
The help center article is intentionally vague on exactly which Claude products or features trigger verification. It references “certain capabilities,” “routine platform integrity checks,” and “safety and compliance measures” without enumerating which specific features or account states prompt the check. Under-18 usage is called out as a policy violation that would result in a ban once detected through verification, though the verification itself is not described as being driven specifically by age-gating logic.
Retention of the submitted identity data is governed by Persona’s retention rules, with Anthropic stating that the vendor deletes data in line with applicable law. The help center article does not disclose a specific retention duration, leaving the practical implementation dependent on Persona’s internal policies and the jurisdictions in which users complete the check.
The rollout places Anthropic alongside a growing number of AI and online services routing identity proofing through mobile document-plus-selfie vendors. The pattern has been visible across consumer identity flows in parallel contexts, including litigation over how mobile identifiers are handled as protected data and wallet-based alternatives now being formalized in national digital ID apps such as Spain’s MiDNI. Anthropic’s choice of a document-and-selfie vendor flow rather than a wallet-attestation flow mirrors the current state of the market: outside the EU and a handful of U.S. states, mobile document verification remains the dominant pattern.
Anthropic has not indicated how widely the verification will be applied or what share of Claude users will encounter the check.
Sources: Claude Help Center, The Register
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
