> Why would my phone number be any of their business?

Preventing abuse? It's much harder to create a throwaway phone number than a throwaway email address.

> OpenAI does the logical thing. Let's me enter my credit card and I'm good to go. I will stay with them.

You'd rather hand over your credit card than your phone number? I think most people would see it the other way around.

Credit card is easily changed. Phone number is much more difficult.

You credit card is also easily charged.

Your phone number isn't.

What is a company going to do with your phone number that you're worried about...?

Not difficult at all for anyone actually wanting to abuse it

You shouldn't have to want to abuse something for it to be inappropriate to be asked.

I agree just debunking the excuse that's always wheeled out for this overreach.

> You'd rather hand over your credit card than your phone number?

You know, that was my first reaction, too. But really, my phone number is much more integral to my identity. I can cancel or change a credit card number pretty trivially and then it's useless to you.

Many credit card companies make it easy to generate one-off card numbers/“virtual cards” you can use to subscribe to services that are hard to cancel or otherwise questionable (so you can cancel just the card you used for that company).

> OpenAI does the logical thing. Let's me enter my credit card and I'm good to go. I will stay with them.

When did you make your account? I could have sworn I had to verify with my phone number before payment.

That's the reason I've not yet signed up. After trying to use some anonymous sms service (which failed), I'm still not having an account:).

They block numbers from any provider considered to be voip.

Honestly I don't think Anthropic cares about you moving over to them - it's pretty evident that they already have more demand than they can handle.

I've always had better experience with Claude in day-to-day coding and text writing, and looking at public forums that largely seems to be the case.

Not for the api.

https://hushed.com/ or specifically this offer https://promo.hushed.com/lp/lifetime-3 which will get you a lifetime number for $25