for digital art. How Claude bans Russians.
Dear friends, you must have heard about the wave of bans in Claude. is it boiling not.
True, first of all you pay for a subscription. Then they ask you for your passport. You send a Russian foreigner and you end up banned. and then try to get your money back if you paid through a broker. Great business, cool. Why not check the documents before taking the money?
Vodomosty calculated that within nine months, Anthropic could have received as much as $2.3 billion in revenue from customers it later identified as infringers. This is up to 7% of the company's total revenue. And yes, Claude is an excellent service, there is zero market here. Therefore, after the ban, people seek access again and pay again.
Claude is not officially available in Russia. But a person writes that he lives in New Zealand, where the service officially works, pays for a subscription and gets a ban immediately after uploading a Russian passport. And I have a question for Anthropic. Do you check where a person lives or what passport they have? If it's the latter, then it's called digital nationalism.
And more about data. The passport photo and selfie are stored by the contractor Persona, and Anthropic can view the verification materials. I would not rush to send documents until the company explains what role citizenship plays in blocking. Because the company collects both your data and your money, preventing you from accessing the service.
This is the type of business that Anthropic is going public with.
Eugene.