The backing from OpenAI almost certainly hinges on the hopes that Sam Altman's World Identity bullshit will get entrenched too as a result from this getting passed, this guy is a threat to international security.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Some people will say "we all knew". We did but every proof is good news and it helps convince deniers.
I can't say I knew, but it doesn't surprise me. The AI folk, among others, want to spy on us as much as possible, but they also know that if they opnly target the kids, they'll get destroyed by lawmakers and courts and public opinion, so they need to pretend that they're only fucking over adults.
What's their motivation? "Protecting the children" from pictures of boobs?
Doubtful.
Instead, I think the AI companies are looking for ways to more easily distinguish human-made "content" from bot-made content, in order to decrease the amount of generative slop that ends up being fed back into their training data.
They want other entities to be responsible for it so they don’t have to be.
Considering the fact that AI based age verification now usually involves taking a head shot and uploading it to the servers of the company, I'm guessing there is an element of facial data collection involved as well.
It’s anticompetitiveness.
They want to squash open models, and anyone too small to comply with this.
I say this in every thread, but the real AI “battle” is open-weights ML vs OpenAI style tech bro AI. And OpenAI wants precisely no one to realize that.
"Open weights" isn't worth a shit either.
If you don't have the access to training data or the computational power to bake it into a model, you are beholden to somebody's (or rather, some corporation's) binary blob. We're talking about the difference between freeware and FOSS effectively.
Not that it matters because all of thin generative AI stuff is for talentless tech bro chuds in the first place...
Even not-fully-reproducible open-weights models are extremely important because they're poison to OpenAI, and they know it. It makes what they're trying to commodify and control effectively free and utilitarian.
But there are fully open models, too, with public training data.
A anyone want to bet Palantir is behind this push?
You know what they are going to be saying to the Stickholders once they get wiped from Europe?
I-ran.
It's identity verification.NNo more anonymity. The wet dream of marketers and autocratic governments alike
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the people who are anonymous are robots and stealth marketers. Normal people aren't usually willing to put in the effort to maintain their privacy. They use their "anonymous" social media and AI accounts on devices tied to their verified credentials (Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.)
My theory is that these companies want identity verification to prevent swarms of bot farms from clogging up their servers. Up until this point, the drawbacks of identity verification outweighed the positives.
No man. Second time running into you on this very topic on a 7 day old account. I'm going to tag you.
It's possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.
But that would defeat the point of "age" verification for these goons.
There is no way to prove definitively that the person using the credential is the same person using the Internet. Hell there's barely enough of a way to prove that there is a human sitting behind your device.
This is why age/identify verification is pointless.
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I cannot understand the online age verification crap. You need a licence to buy alcohol, but once it's in your house your kid can drink it. If their so worried just make it so u have to be 18 to buy a computer. This makes it so a age check was in place to get online, yet no identity is tied to the services. Then anybody underage online is only doing so because an adult facilitated it (which is basically currently the case). Shit I had to show id to get my phone contract, and to get my internet so an age verification check was in place for all these kids smart phones and wifi access that their PARENTS provided and now the parents are mad they have access to adult content??? This is like being mad that your kid under age drank when you bought them liquor. The fuck did they think would happen? The real reason they want this stuff to go in place is to harvest more info for private gain.
It's because it's not about age verification, it's about surveillance.
I kind of disagree. How can you be certain a person in is a certain age without determining who that person is?
The local AI concept is flawed, as is anything that relies on trusting the user.
If you want to be certain that someone is over 18 at some point you need a government ID or birth certificate, and at that point you know a hell of a lot more about them than their age.
This is identity verification.
In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That's already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they're given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously "true" if they can successfully complete the verification).
So, here's how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.
In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one's digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.
- An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
- A website who wants to verify a user's age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
- The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
- The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation's private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
- The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device's keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
- After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says "I've completed the verification." The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with "completed" if the user has accepted the request, or "not completed" if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.
How do you positively confirm age without confirming identity and referencing it to an official birth certificate?
With something like a physical gift card.
Go to a store or kiosk, show them your ID card or driver's license, and they'll give you a card randomly chosen from the shelf with a code to activate the +18 version of any social network of your choice.
Each code could only be used once. People would have to buy more, at a symbolic cost, for each social network they wished to activate.
I would tend to be against this in the same way, but at least it would be something I could understand where the objective is actually what is being presented (protecting the children), albeit misguided, because to me it is clear that what is currently being promoted and proposed has nothing to do with age verification, but rather with mass surveillance, marketing and censorship.
That's not something I've seen suggested before but it is an interesting way to go about it.
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Of course.
it is backed by META, AI, OpenAI, they all want to sell the data tot o govt, thats where the money is.
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Age verification requirements for AI? As in "AI needs to be at least this mature before released to be used"?
Shall I pretend to be surprised?