Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Anthropic, a leading AI lab, is quietly constructing a surveillance apparatus to track activists and predict protests, according to job postings and interviews with its security officials. The system, which includes real-time protest alerts and reporting individuals to police before any crime occurs, conflicts with Anthropic's public image as the responsible AI alternative. The company has even refused to share evidence with police after reporting a user for threatening comments. This expansion of domestic monitoring aligns with Anthropic's renewed focus on national security and its push to have AI designated as critical infrastructure.
The goal would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management.
- cldellow
The editorializing in this article is quite something.
If I strip out the editorializing, I think the conclusions are:
1. Someone told Claude they had an AR-15 and the CEO of Anthropic was "in their sights". Anthropic reported this to the police.
2. Anthropic contracts with a security agency.
3. Anthropic is looking to build in-house capability for security.
Anthropic clearly has high-value targets (see, e.g. the person with the AR-15 from point 1). When I worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, they also had in-house security to investigate threats against facilities and executives.
I would believe Anthropic is doing evil things, but I don't think this article actually makes that claim, despite the bombast about "pre-crime".
- palmotea
Remember guys: Anthropic are the good guys! They care about morals, alignment, and safety! So this invasive surveillance to crush dissent must be good for us!
AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!
- slowin
> “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust … I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”
Says the guy creating a pre-crime global surveillance apparatus. Wonder why people don't trust him!
- vaylian
> “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”
> [..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,”
Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?
- woah
Sorry to spoil the party in here, but is this different than the security that any large corporation has?
The headline anecdote is about them re-routing executives around a protest based on information from a publicly filed permit.
The other anecdote is about them reporting a user who made a death threat.
- sleight42
Seriously? No one said "the first step in Roko's Basilisk"???
- hyperbolablabla
Can't wait for the UK government to start convicting dissidents for precrime
- smalltorch
It's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.