What age can my child use Claude? The short answer is 18

When a family asks about the minimum age for an AI assistant, the answer going around is almost always 13. For Claude that is wrong, and not because of some country-level detail: the gap is five years.

18, in every country

Anthropic's consumer terms of service put it in one sentence: you must be at least 18 years old to use the services. There is no country table as with Gemini, and no middle band with parental permission as with ChatGPT. One number, the same in Ireland, in Canada and in South Africa.

Why this catches almost everyone out

Because the three assistants most likely to be running at home have three different rules, and none resembles the others. One asks for 13, with a parent's permission up to 18. Another depends on the country you live in, with three years between neighbours. Claude asks for 18 and stops there. We have written about the other two separately, each with its own check date.

What this means at home

Below 18 there is no correct route into the consumer product. That is the sharpest difference from Gemini, where a Family Link supervised account is a narrow but legitimate door. Here there is no door. A sixteen-year-old cannot use Claude with a parent's blessing, because the terms do not provide for that blessing at all.

One case belongs in its own box: if the school works with Claude, that is not the same product. Educational institutions sign an institutional agreement, and there the school sets the conditions, not the family. If your teenager uses Claude in class but not at home, that is not a contradiction.

And if they are already using it

They usually are, because nobody checks an ID. The useful conversation at home is not about punishment but about why the limit exists: a service that sets 18 is telling you it did not build its safeguards with minors in mind. That is information about the product, not about your child, and it helps you decide together what gets used for what.