Identity Checks Are Coming to the Internet — And Your Users
Governments are pushing identity verification online while the US decides who gets GPT-5.6 access — a new gatekeeping era is forming fast.
The signal: The ‘papers, please’ internet is arriving: identity verification mandates are spreading online while the US government moves to control access to frontier AI models like GPT-5.6.
Why it matters: If you’re building anything with user-generated content, authentication, or AI API access, your compliance surface just got bigger and your user funnel just got narrower — friction at sign-up will become a design and conversion problem you can’t engineer around.
The pattern I’m watching: Two forces are converging: governments want identity attached to online activity, and they also want to decide who gets the most powerful AI tools. That’s not just a privacy story — that’s a moat being built around frontier AI that favors incumbents and regulated players over indie builders.
What I’d do with this: Audit your onboarding flow now and decide whether you can absorb identity verification requirements without killing conversion. More importantly, if your product depends on frontier model API access, start diversifying across providers — betting everything on a single model that could become government-gated is a real business risk.