I'm a big proponent of self-hosting, right to repair, and rolling your own whatever when you can. That probably started as teenage rebellion that got baked in - I was lucky enough to read both Walden and The Hobbit during a week-long cyclone lockdown several decades ago - but I suspect there's a non-trivial overlap between that space and privacy-minded people in general.

My endgame is a self-sufficient intranet for myself and family: if the net goes down tomorrow, we'd barely notice.

I also use LLMs as a tool. True self-hosted equivalence to state-of-the-art models is still an expensive proposition, so like many, I use cloud-based tools like Claude or Codex for domain-specific heavy lifting - mostly coding. Not apologising for it; I think it's a reasonable trade-off while local hardware catches up.

That context is just to establish where I'm coming from when I say this caught my attention today:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude

To be accurate about what it actually says: this isn't a blanket "show us your passport to use Claude." Not yet.

The policy as written is narrower than it might first appear.

My concern isn't what it says - it's that the precedent now exists. OAI will do doubt follow suite.

Scope creep is a documented pattern with this kind of thing, and "we only use it for X" describes current intent, not a structural constraint.

Given the nature of this community, figured it was worth flagging.