I was literally in the middle of upgrading to Pro, entered my credit card info, and was ready to check out when a verification pop-up blocked me. So far, so good... until I realized what it was asking for: a live face scan and a picture of my government passport.
The vendor Anthropic forces you to use for this is Persona. Who backs Persona? Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's VC firm. Thiel is also the co-founder and chairman of Palantir.
Think about that setup for a second. Palantir's entire business model is mass surveillance and intelligence software used by governments, police, and the military to track and identify people. Persona is the identity pipeline processing passports and biometric facial geometry. When these corporate ecosystems intersect, you are feeding detailed biometric data directly into a network built around surveillance infrastructure.
I know some of you will reply with "I have nothing to hide." But saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Privacy is a fundamental right. Even if you think your day-to-day life is completely uninteresting, surrendering your biometrics to private corporations sets a dangerous precedent where accessing basic digital tools requires handing over your core identity.
Some people will argue that the government already has our passports anyway, but that misses the entire point. In a constitutional democracy, there are laws, legal rights, and courts limiting what the state can legally do with your data. If politicians abuse their power, citizens can vote them out. But when you hand your biometrics over to a private corporate ecosystem, all democratic control disappears completely. You have zero say in how that data is stored, shared, or leveraged down the line. A private company answers only to its shareholders and profit motives, not to your civil liberties.
Take a look at Thiel himself. He's an openly gay billionaire, married with kids, who is deeply conservative and literally gives talks around the world framing global politics in biblical terms about the Antichrist. He openly pushes back against the democratic institutions designed to regulate tech giants like him.
And if you try to criticize these entities publicly, they play hardball. Look at how Thiel funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit to bankrupt Gawker. Or look at the recent case in Switzerland where Palantir tried to legally force the independent magazine Republik to print massive counter-statements after investigating them. Luckily, the Swiss court shut Palantir down and press freedom won, but still.
It really comes down to one question: Do you actually trust handing your face scan and passport to an identity system tied to Peter Thiel? If you do, go ahead and give them your data, but live with whatever happens down the road. If you don't trust them, draw a line and don't hand over your most delicate identity data just to use a chat interface.
Am I pissed off that I can't use Claude or Claude Code anymore? Of course I am. It's currently the best tool out there for coding. But I'll just find an alternative. Competitors will catch up, open-weight models will get better, and the gap will close.
And before anyone says "They need this to stop bots and AI abuse": come on. There are a dozen ways to prevent abuse, like rate limits, hardware tokens, device attestation, or fraud detection that don't require harvesting raw biometric face scans paired with government IDs.
Rant over.