April 16, 2026
Today's Top Stories
1.
Opus 4.7 Model ID Spotted on Google Vertex AI — A user surfaced
anthropic-claude-opus-4-7 in the Vertex AI console quota page, corroborating last week's Information report. Polymarket now pegs a launch on or before today at roughly 79%. A design tool is expected in the same wave.
2.
Anthropic Rolls Out Government ID + Selfie Verification — A quiet help-center update confirms Claude users can now be asked for passport and live selfie via Persona before accessing certain capabilities. Data is held by Persona, not used for training — but the privacy debate started overnight.
3.
Yesterday's Three-Hour Claude Outage Leaves Questions — Claude.ai, API, and Claude Code hit elevated errors at 10:53 AM ET, returned and broke again, then fully recovered by 1:42 PM ET. 7,000+ users reported problems. Coming right after the "nerf" backlash, it's bad timing.