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Just a few days ago, on Friday, my 15 year old son had his Claude account suspended with a demand for ID to prove he is 18 or older. He had his own Claude Max s

Just a few days ago, on Friday, my 15 year old son had his Claude account suspended with a demand for ID to prove he is 18 or older. He had his own Claude Max subscription (he out-earns me fairly frequently in his circle of gaming programmers), and was unaware Anthropic had a must-be-18 rule, as was I. Their email said "Our team found signals that your account was used by a child. This breaks our rules, so we paused your access to Claude." So I guess if you ever ask a question that seems to originate from a teen or less, expect to hit an ID gate. So now he's a Codex user. OpenAI and Google both have a minimum age of 13. EDIT: I should note that Anthropic gave him a refund for the whole month that was underway, despite him being nearing the end of it. So good on them.

trollbridge 6mo ago
... so let me understand this. It is frequently said that programming directly is obsolete, and the skill you must have now is knowing how to operate agentic AIs. Yet you aren't allowed to do this until you're 18. So, developing software is now 18+ only?
- llm_nerd 6mo ago
  It seems out of step and foolish, and the cynic in me says that Anthropic has a side hustle of identity harvesting and is looking for justifications, but on the flip side, there is a real risk of pearl clutching if a child ever uses AI, and maybe Anthropic just wants to steer clear of all of that. Though simply putting it in the ToS should be sufficient legal shielding, and the idea that they're chat harvesting to age fingerprint conversations seems dubious.
- square_usual 6mo ago
  > It is frequently said that programming directly is obsolete Who says this?
  - sn0wleppard 6mo ago
    The CEO of the company in question with the age limit, for one
    - paradox242 6mo ago
      I would hope most people can recognize that someone trying to sell you something might be among the least trustworthy sources about that thing.
  - bryancoxwell 6mo ago
    I mean, you can disagree with the sentiment (I certainly do), but there are still an awful lot of people saying it.
    - nozzlegear 6mo ago
      I thought it was true too, for a couple of months. Then the honeymoon phase ended and now I only use Claude to write commit message drafts (which I rewrite myself) and review PRs.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
  Qwen3 runs locally on reasonable hardware, and is comparable to a mid-2025 Claude Sonnet (albeit possibly rather slower) . Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard. So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV) edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    Whats "reasonable hardware"?
    - Borealid 6mo ago
      A machine with 128GB of unified system RAM will run reasonable-fidelity quantizations (4-bit or more). If you ever want to answer this type of question yourself, you can look at the size of the model files. Loading a model usually uses an amount of RAM around the size it occupies on disk, plus a few gigabytes for the context window. Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is 120GB. Quantized to 4 bits it is ~70GB. You can run a 70GB model in 80GB of VRAM or 128GB of unified normal RAM. Systems with that capability cost a small number of thousand USD to purchase new. If you are willing to sacrifice some performance, you can take advantage of the model being a mixture-of-experts and use disk space to get by with less RAM/VRAM, but inference speed will suffer.
    - Someone1234 6mo ago
      People have tried to run Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on 4x $600 used, Nvidia 3090s with 24 GB of VRAM each (96 GB total), and while it runs, it is too slow for production grade (<8 tokens/second). So we're already at $2400 before you've purchased system memory and CPU; and it is too slow for a "Sonnet equivalent" setup yet... You can quantize it of course, but if the idea is "as close to Sonnet as possible," then while quantized models are objectively more efficient they are sacrificing precision for it. So next step is to up that speed, so we're at 4x $1300, Nvidia 5090s with 32 GB of VRAM each (128 GB), or $5,200 before RAM/CPU/etc. All of this additional cost to increase your tokens/second without lobotomizing the model. This still may not be enough. I guess my point is: You see this conversation a LOT online. "Qwen3 can be near Sonnet!" but then when asked how, instead of giving you an answer for the true "near Sonnet" model per benchmarks, they suddenly start talking about a substantially inferior Qwen3 model that is cheap to run at home (e.g. 27B/30B quantized down to Q4/Q5). The local models absolutely DO exist that are "near Sonnet." The hardware to actually run them is the bottleneck, and it is a HUGE financial/practical bottleneck. If you had a $10K all-in budget, it isn't actually insane for this class of model, and the sky really is the limit (again to reduce quantization and or increase tokens/second). PS - And electricity costs are non-trivial for 4x 3090s or 4x 5090s.
- guzfip 6mo ago
  Yes, today’s kids should instead learn to be influencers. This is genuine advice I’ve seen from high profile business types. We’re fucked in the sense our children will be made to be attention whores online.
nozzlegear 6mo ago
> he out-earns me fairly frequently in his circle of gaming programmers Can you expand on this? Your teenage son makes more money than you do professionally, by vibe coding video games?
- llm_nerd 6mo ago
  Who said anything about "vibe coding"? Using coding tools like Claude Code as just another tool in the belt is something the overwhelming bulk of professional devs do now (and given that my son managed to find a number of clients paying for his work, he qualifies as professional). Pejorative "vibe coding" nonsense doesn't change this.
  - nozzlegear 6mo ago
    Call it whatever you want then, I'm still interested in the question at hand – your son makes more money than you do professionally, using Claude Code to make something video game related?
    - llm_nerd 6mo ago
      He makes solutions for people and they pay him money for doing so. I mean...pretty much exactly how we all operate? He's excellent at networking and has built an enormous connection tree.
      - pixxel 6mo ago
        [dead]
      - nozzlegear 6mo ago
        That's interesting, good for him! When I was a teenager I spent all my time playing Halo 2, I didn't write my first line of code until my early 20s.
      - jazz9k 6mo ago
        This sounds so sketchy and vague. Why do you need to keep defending it, if it's complely legit?
alistairmayo 6mo ago
Yeah. I do not get the 18-years-old age gate. It's not like they're protecting anyone. AI is available so freely now anyone who wants it can get it. Anthropic made the best models by hiring non-technical folks like philosophers to build the best training sets and evaluations. Now, it seems like their philosophers are telling people how they can and can't use their model.
- basisword 6mo ago
  Liability. OpenAI have had several court cases now I believe where children killed themselves after interacting with ChatGPT. Less liability if the user is an adult.
progbits 6mo ago
> Anthropic gave him a refund for the whole month that was underway, despite him being nearing the end of it I sense an opportunity for free tokens. Ideas for prompts that reliably trigger the age check?

trollbridge 6mo ago

... so let me understand this. It is frequently said that programming directly is obsolete, and the skill you must have now is knowing how to operate agentic AIs. Yet you aren't allowed to do this until you're 18. So, developing software is now 18+ only?

llm_nerd 6mo ago
It seems out of step and foolish, and the cynic in me says that Anthropic has a side hustle of identity harvesting and is looking for justifications, but on the flip side, there is a real risk of pearl clutching if a child ever uses AI, and maybe Anthropic just wants to steer clear of all of that. Though simply putting it in the ToS should be sufficient legal shielding, and the idea that they're chat harvesting to age fingerprint conversations seems dubious.
square_usual 6mo ago
> It is frequently said that programming directly is obsolete Who says this?
- sn0wleppard 6mo ago
  The CEO of the company in question with the age limit, for one
  - paradox242 6mo ago
    I would hope most people can recognize that someone trying to sell you something might be among the least trustworthy sources about that thing.
- bryancoxwell 6mo ago
  I mean, you can disagree with the sentiment (I certainly do), but there are still an awful lot of people saying it.
  - nozzlegear 6mo ago
    I thought it was true too, for a couple of months. Then the honeymoon phase ended and now I only use Claude to write commit message drafts (which I rewrite myself) and review PRs.
Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
Qwen3 runs locally on reasonable hardware, and is comparable to a mid-2025 Claude Sonnet (albeit possibly rather slower) . Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard. So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV) edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  Whats "reasonable hardware"?
  - Borealid 6mo ago
    A machine with 128GB of unified system RAM will run reasonable-fidelity quantizations (4-bit or more). If you ever want to answer this type of question yourself, you can look at the size of the model files. Loading a model usually uses an amount of RAM around the size it occupies on disk, plus a few gigabytes for the context window. Qwen3.5-122B-A10B is 120GB. Quantized to 4 bits it is ~70GB. You can run a 70GB model in 80GB of VRAM or 128GB of unified normal RAM. Systems with that capability cost a small number of thousand USD to purchase new. If you are willing to sacrifice some performance, you can take advantage of the model being a mixture-of-experts and use disk space to get by with less RAM/VRAM, but inference speed will suffer.
  - Someone1234 6mo ago
    People have tried to run Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on 4x $600 used, Nvidia 3090s with 24 GB of VRAM each (96 GB total), and while it runs, it is too slow for production grade (<8 tokens/second). So we're already at $2400 before you've purchased system memory and CPU; and it is too slow for a "Sonnet equivalent" setup yet... You can quantize it of course, but if the idea is "as close to Sonnet as possible," then while quantized models are objectively more efficient they are sacrificing precision for it. So next step is to up that speed, so we're at 4x $1300, Nvidia 5090s with 32 GB of VRAM each (128 GB), or $5,200 before RAM/CPU/etc. All of this additional cost to increase your tokens/second without lobotomizing the model. This still may not be enough. I guess my point is: You see this conversation a LOT online. "Qwen3 can be near Sonnet!" but then when asked how, instead of giving you an answer for the true "near Sonnet" model per benchmarks, they suddenly start talking about a substantially inferior Qwen3 model that is cheap to run at home (e.g. 27B/30B quantized down to Q4/Q5). The local models absolutely DO exist that are "near Sonnet." The hardware to actually run them is the bottleneck, and it is a HUGE financial/practical bottleneck. If you had a $10K all-in budget, it isn't actually insane for this class of model, and the sky really is the limit (again to reduce quantization and or increase tokens/second). PS - And electricity costs are non-trivial for 4x 3090s or 4x 5090s.
guzfip 6mo ago
Yes, today’s kids should instead learn to be influencers. This is genuine advice I’ve seen from high profile business types. We’re fucked in the sense our children will be made to be attention whores online.

nozzlegear 6mo ago

> he out-earns me fairly frequently in his circle of gaming programmers Can you expand on this? Your teenage son makes more money than you do professionally, by vibe coding video games?

llm_nerd 6mo ago
Who said anything about "vibe coding"? Using coding tools like Claude Code as just another tool in the belt is something the overwhelming bulk of professional devs do now (and given that my son managed to find a number of clients paying for his work, he qualifies as professional). Pejorative "vibe coding" nonsense doesn't change this.
- nozzlegear 6mo ago
  Call it whatever you want then, I'm still interested in the question at hand – your son makes more money than you do professionally, using Claude Code to make something video game related?
  - llm_nerd 6mo ago
    He makes solutions for people and they pay him money for doing so. I mean...pretty much exactly how we all operate? He's excellent at networking and has built an enormous connection tree.
    - pixxel 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - nozzlegear 6mo ago
      That's interesting, good for him! When I was a teenager I spent all my time playing Halo 2, I didn't write my first line of code until my early 20s.
    - jazz9k 6mo ago
      This sounds so sketchy and vague. Why do you need to keep defending it, if it's complely legit?

alistairmayo 6mo ago

Yeah. I do not get the 18-years-old age gate. It's not like they're protecting anyone. AI is available so freely now anyone who wants it can get it. Anthropic made the best models by hiring non-technical folks like philosophers to build the best training sets and evaluations. Now, it seems like their philosophers are telling people how they can and can't use their model.

basisword 6mo ago
Liability. OpenAI have had several court cases now I believe where children killed themselves after interacting with ChatGPT. Less liability if the user is an adult.

progbits 6mo ago

> Anthropic gave him a refund for the whole month that was underway, despite him being nearing the end of it I sense an opportunity for free tokens. Ideas for prompts that reliably trigger the age check?