The identity verification support page says 'updated this week' but that is just an update to the appeals process. https://www.diffchecker.com/HuY8QMOX/
"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."
The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.
An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.
I appreciate that you're demystifying this, but you are downplaying the difficulty of keeping 4 tallies with perfect accuracy for 100 steps while processing new inputs every 300ms. That produces demands on working memory and parallel processing that probably exceed the capabilities of our linguistic systems.
The claim is not that the algorithm is complicated, but that the abacus training helps in execution by involving visuospatial brain areas instead. Your argument is like saying training methods for track athletes are all equally effective because running is simply putting one foot in front of the other quickly.
I agree that multiplying 42x37 is not difficult. Many western mental calculators can do so quickly. I also agree that grinding, memorization, and tricks play a role in mental math.
> the correlation between Asia and mental math + abacus is spurious
However, I do not think the correlation is spurious. Involving additional brain areas like premotor (imagining moving the beads) and parietal (seeing the beads) is likely responsible for the incredible speeds achieved by trained abacus users. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00050-8
Western mental addition operates on fundamentally different timescales. Here's Aaryan Shukla adding 100 4-digit numbers in 300ms per number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ouUk0zIbos
I view this as a political constraint, cf. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscra.... One's identity as Academic, Democrat, Zionist and so on demands certain sacrifices of you, sometimes of rationality. The worse the failure of empathy and rationality, the better a test of loyalty it is. For epistemic rationality, it would be best to https://paulgraham.com/identity.html, but for instrumental rationality it is not. Consequently, many people are reasonable only until certain topics come up, and it's generally worked around by steering the discussion to other topics.
There was, however, also a change to the privacy policy, effective July 8, 2026. See https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10301952-updates-to-o... It now says:
"Verification Data: In certain circumstances, we may ask you to verify your age or identity. If you choose to do so, data we will collect includes, depending on the method: an image of your government-issued identity document and the information appearing on it (such as your ID number and date of birth); your image in photo or video form, facial geometry templates (which may be considered ‘biometric data’ in some jurisdictions); and the result of the verification (for example, whether your age meets the applicable threshold)."
The previous (Jan 2026) version did not have this.
An Anthropic employee suggests on X that this is just so users flagged for potentially fraudulent activity have a way to get their account reinstated and it is unrelated to the Fable rollout.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858