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".
That's not the only example discussed. Anthropic also partners with the Palantir-like Samdesk:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
So they're monitoring activists outside of Anthropic's systems.
> Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption
Oh no, The Executives might have been exposed to the real world! Why aren't people thinking more about The Executives and what dangers they must face?! Good thing we can systematically monitor every other human being so The Executives don't have to see these terrorists on our streets.
Pressure on powerful people is good for society. Anyone making life or death decisions for the rest of us should have their own life on the table as well.
Charlie Kirk is irrelevant to this conversation. No one has been convicted in his assassination and it's unlikely that it was "activism" since no one has claimed that. He's a guy who said stuff many people found offensive, he also happened to cross a nation state known for assassinations and subterfuge shortly before he was shot.
This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.
Explain, it looks like samdesk is in a more narrow domain but overlapping and very related methods and business. Un-palantir-like seems like it would be a stronger editorialization.
Palantir sell consulting services ("forward deployed engineering") around graph and map database platforms, using data supplied by customers. Some of their customers ask them to make surveillance aggregation systems, others ask them to make totally banal and random enterprise software (this is why you commonly see freak-outs around hospitals buying "Palantir," for example; usually they are operating as consultants making some kind of medical records warehousing system owned by the customer).
Samdesk provide risk analytics using traditional risk analysis investigation and research, which they have now welded an "AI platform" to, like everyone does these days. They aggregate crime and protest data to make a map of "places your employees might be at risk" and sell it to companies.
Samdesk would be a Palantir _customer_ if they liked parting with their money, not a competitor; Palantir operate at a much "lower level" and don't do the data collection or research on their own.
Don't forget the main point that Anthropic reported the user to the police but didn't share any of his messages or conversation history with the cops. Because their security policy doesn't allow it.
In my view, LLM companies are in a tough spot here.
I grew up in Dawson Creek, BC. An hour's drive away is Tumbler Ridge. In February 2026, someone did a mass shooting, killing 6 people and injuring 2 dozen more.
The shooter had previously discussed this with ChatGPT, but OpenAI did not report it to the authorities at the time.
In hindsight, that was an error.
Should the LLM companies be the ones determining if threats are real, or should they just default to letting the police investigate?
I'm fine with the latter. Again, I absolutely believe that these companies have immense power to do evil, I just don't think the linked article is strong evidence of it.
By allowing the monitoring of AI conversations, we are creating a dystopian world where essentially all recorded or spoken thought is monitored (given that AI has or will have access to almost all conversations).
No, I don't want to live in that world, and I would definitely read an article discussing how to ensure we don't reach that world.
That said, I think that world is quite a few steps away from the scenario being discussed, which is "when talking to X, X might report my conversation to the police".
You comment elsewhere that this might be a have vs have-not divide -- if you can afford to self-host a powerful LLM, you will have more liberties.
I think this isn't that trenchant of an observation for two reasons: (1) the wealthy have always had an advantage in exercising their rights over the poor, but more importantly, (2) the capability vs cost ratio of self-hosted LLMs continues to improve at an insanely rapid pace.
I could use Tor or Google from the library if I wanted. Maybe I would accidentally leak my paper trail, like the Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) did. But it was possible.
I don't think you should think of it like "playing a game", you should think of it as "posting to a web service you don't control". If you posted on a web forum about your plans for violence against the CEO of that forum, they'd probably contact the police too, and I don't particularly think there's anything sinister about this.
So we're creating a system where people who can afford their own hardware can speak to AI freely but the plebes will be monitored by the elites for any attempted uprising?
"Creating"? I don't think there has ever been a system where you can expect to be able to plan an uprising against the elites in public, or using infrastructure those elites own and control. I wouldn't expect to be able to plan a peasant revolt in the lord's manor.
Note the "type" of activists that are always seen as problematic. I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?" -- I would not be reported to anyone.
>I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?"
Tried it for about 5min in Gemini and got condescended at the way Reddit condescends at people who don't want to pull a permit for an improvement to their own property.
Edit: And then just for kicks in the same context I asked it for a list of legislators with immediate family, friends and business associates most well versed in and qualified to have opinions about new products in the pharma industry to which it replied it can't do that here's what I can do and then proceeded to spit back a list of every rep with medical experience with a token warning about laws and rules at the end.
alignment and safety understands victimless crimes
now if you were talking about nonconsensual sex workers for the party, it would also be aligned in calling them victims and reporting you if you had someone specific in mind to traffic
10/10 thanks for all your contributions to Fable 5.1
then it will have to go after the senator who cant think for themself and asks Claude what to do after accepting the bribe and trying to hide their tracks
It seems we will soon start seeing all the warnings about the immense risks of giving even a micron on free speech coming back to haunt us with a vengeance.
Soon enough the insane, irrational, and rather schizophrenic, manic, and histrionic reactions to things like "I want to blow the roof off that place", or "blow that place up" being a metaphor for maybe performing really well or maybe exposing something like a corrupt government agency or taking out a competitor; will lead to all kinds of language and tone policing, where you may get a swat team kicking down your door because AI perceived that you said something with a certain tone in your voice.
Just today Gemini policed as something like "harmful or dangerous prompts" for asking "where do I look up if there have been state level indictments/charges against someone".
People keep rightfully calling Trump a wannabe king, but all of these tone/speech and even action policing trends have been going on for many years and even decades now. This is not solely a Trump admin. issue, there has been a continuity of agenda across effectively all administrations for many decades. The exactly number of decades is at this point moot.
1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"
I would personally be fine with Anthropic disclosing the chat logs, but I can see why they'd prefer not to. No doubt that would have resulted in another complaint about them building a panopticon and sharing people's conversations verbatim with the authorities.
The person doesn't seem to deny having written the messages, or claim that they were flagrantly taken out of context. His response to the media was that he was "just fucking around" and that he didn't want to talk about it.
It's also worth mentioning that this happened in August 2026, after the February 2026 Tumbler Ridge BC shooting. The shooter in that scenario had discussed planning gun violence with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT didn't report it to the authorities, so no follow up happened. Presumably the LLM companies have decided to more aggressively report these things to the police as a result.
yeah, not sure what the right answer here is... but it definitely isn't "trust us, we would never lie (fingers crossed behind back)".
What does a non-AI company do? If I emailed Tim Cook and said I had a gun and was coming for him, I imagine Apple would turn the email over to their security team, who would then go to the local PD/FBI/whoever. I'd expect the same here, at least for anything that resembles a direct threat.
This isn't quite into the pre-crime sci-fi zone yet, IMO. That would be more like "this guy bought a gun, then bought gas out of state, then did something else, therefore he must be planning an assassination". Unfortunately, I expect this situation will end up reported as well, and the police, looking for work to do, will take it as gospel and charge ahead without a second thought (like the recent journalist with a "bad" (aka fat-fingered) license plate).
"It is all just for your safety." and other excuses.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is viable by Anthropic to do so, it is a business decision. Nevertheless the reasons sound contrived and mask the demand for such a lucrative business opportunity, if you abstract it away from activists.
This is not about moral, only about reality.
Maybe Anthropic had a nice chat with the administration and/or think, that this was something, that interests them on a psychological level: predicting human behavior.
Look at Muse from Meta: Meta is doing exactly the same I bet, to optimize their ad business.
Anthropic will sooner or later feature ads, and maybe this is a way to distract from this usage possibility.
Remember, the "No! We don't work with the government, we want privacy for our customers." mantra won't match with "We need to make money and surveillance of our customers would be helpful as well as a cool topic for our engineers to work on."
Anthropic itself will be yet another normal Big Tech company, all, even those who boasted "Don't be evil" or encrypt like hell their smartphones allegedly made good bucks in China.
It is ok, no problem with that by Anthropic just with their hypocrisy in my point of view.
I mean, it's the same sort of slippery slope that the progressive left was saying about the formation of DHS and ICE in the early 2000s that everyone poo-poo'd and said 'no way that'll happen in America' - that these depts would end up being a tools of fascistic repression of political opponents (eg NSPM-7) and a major vehicle for inflicting mass suffering on immigrants of all stripes
Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not. But cautioning skepticism towards multi-billion dollar institutions with a lot of power and how good their intentions really are is never a wrong move, imo
plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding
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!
> You won't need to wear sunglasses because apparently there's a >10% chance there is no future.
That's a reasonable risk to take if there's a possibility of Dario Amodei becoming a trillionaire with his very own Stasi. I think AI could be very useful to implement Zersetzung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung), and I am excited about the future technological advances in that area. It'll be a really interesting white paper!
Well, I'm a cynical nobody so my predictions aren't worth much, but I suspect we'll get the trillionaires and really dark dystopia (compared to the one we have now) for at least a short time before The End comes.
> “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?
It can be! I've definitely been to protests where, had an executive of the company we were protesting walked by, a lot of people would have gotten in their face and made them very uncomfortable. There's no law against being mean or rude, and often even vaguely threatening speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Of course it is. Are you instead thinking of the carefully controlled and choreographed “protests” in countries like China where the government and especially the police knows with absolute certainty what the crowd is protesting against and how they are protesting, with an overwhelming police presence that’s ready to shut down the whole protest at the first whiff of trouble?
And of course it is a high-stress situation if you are merely a passerby with no advance knowledge of what the protest is all about, which is what is happening here. Are the protesters aligned with or against your own values? Will anything you wear or the way you look become the ire of the protesters? Suppose for the sake of argument you did not vote for Donald Trump, would it not be stressful if no one told you in advance that a group of Trump supporters are protesting against the “unfair” votes right in front of you?
Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
> “several individuals involved in incidents reported to police were already being tracked by Anthropic security.”
Comsider the tracking potential.
Now consider that they can perform textual analysis at a scale large enough to figure out who you are based on your linguistic fingerprints across HN, Meta, Github, forms you've filled out for you child's school, your doctor, or wherever else a service provider has used them.
These are "AI" companies but monitoring is what the AI is and will be used for.
> “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!
It's baffling how oblivious these people appear to be. I still can't tell if it's an act or not. If it is, what benefit do they get from playing dumb? If not, how did we let people who don't understand basic cause and effect or basic human emotion become in charge of the future of the world?
I thought his repeated use of the phrase "ordinary people" instead of something like "laypersons" was a little telling about how he views himself and the members of his industry. The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
I don't think they're oblivious, I think they're lying. Playing dumb/plausible deniability can give them enough wiggle room to execute plans that would otherwise be stopped before it's too late.
> 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.”
This doesn't sound like something coming from Anthropic's platforms:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
> “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
Shielding the executives from the voices of the people. There's a recurring pattern that people with power physically distance themselves from common people, journalists and victims of their actions. They do not want to get personally confronted, every interaction "with the public" needs to be 100% controlled by them. Critics can ask them anything, sure, but only on their terms. This is how they protect themselves from responsibility.
It's not neutral until everyone has equal access to it.
You as a nobody, should be able to use it right now, to strip away all privacy and see the very thoughts of all those people, since that is what they can do to you right now.
Man, why are you copy-pasting comments from the 90s? The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals!
> The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals!
No no, I assure you, it's quite capable of getting very much worse.
Yeah this administration may have some of the worst intent imaginable, but at least they're bad at hiding it and hitting opposition at every corner... Absolutely more room for evil in this world.
I think the way to understand the objection here is that it's rhetorical flair (grandparent's dictum) that feels like it's intent is to assuage -- because it's a conditional that is implicitly loaded with an assumption about the current state of affairs ("not today") --, but that reasonably speaking, already things are bad enough to make such a conditional disingenuous. "Maximally evil" is just stressing it, though not technically true, because obviously things can always get worse. Personally, (and the reason I reply here since it hasn't been raised elsewhere in the thread), I have always objected to said conditional but on grounds of the principle that it leaves an opening to argue against what should be an absolute right (the standard for excellent conduct should not be "don't worry, we're not the worst so it's alright when we do it").
Wow. That's incredibly optimistic. Imagine, for example, the next 'no kings' protest is met with machine gun fire, rather than ice sporadically killing activists. And then start adding on stuff.
Today, the people at the top need people at the bottom to sustain their lifestyle. Put on your billionare sociopath hat for a moment and ask yourself: If AI ever becomes sufficient to run an economy, why should you care about whether they live or die?
Then, ask yourself why the wealthy are so obsessed with AI.
Imagine defending a corporation because they were "different" because they were here to deliver "safe" and "responsible" AI and are the "good guys".
It turns out that Anthropic (and OpenAI) are no different to Palantir or are just Palantir-lite and both have government contracts, their AI tech was used in wars and now they are used for surveillance.
This is one of the core reasons I am unwilling to use their closed Ai. Have we forgotten the last two decades of SV darlings to demons? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
An account created 10 minutes ago is theorizing about the "deep state"... very 2016 of you.
Why would billionaires need a secret "deep state"? They can just openly talk about what they're doing with impunity. They own the publicly visible government and everyone knows it. Nothing "deep" about it.
Why the scorn if you fail to understand a simple implication? The thesis (unproven of course) is that certain agencies use women to monitor certain billionaires.
Billionaires do not need the deep state? Palantir was founded partly by In-Q-Tel and "libertarian" Thiel depends on government money. Similarly, most of Anthropic and OpenAI's actual income will come from surveillance.
Deep here is similar to “deep web”, ie, there is depth to the institutions beyond their apparent surface layers. The elites need a deep state because organizations are made of people — and the administrators of the fora where they give those speeches is a great example of people in the deep state.
I don't believe I've ever heard Amodei "openly talk" about his wife being an Epstein person. I think the CIA/Mossad/who knows what else connections that a lot of these companies have is generally swept under the rug.
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".
That's not the only example discussed. Anthropic also partners with the Palantir-like Samdesk:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
So they're monitoring activists outside of Anthropic's systems.
> Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption
Oh no, The Executives might have been exposed to the real world! Why aren't people thinking more about The Executives and what dangers they must face?! Good thing we can systematically monitor every other human being so The Executives don't have to see these terrorists on our streets.
When activists threaten to and follow through with killing people, demand is created.
We are 1 year out from Charlie Kirk being shot on a college campus, in case reminders are needed.
Many dark corners of the internet encourage and celebrate this type of thing more and more.
Dark corners?!?
The president of the US celebrated the killing of State senator Hortman.
The fish rots at the head.
Pressure on powerful people is good for society. Anyone making life or death decisions for the rest of us should have their own life on the table as well.
Charlie Kirk is irrelevant to this conversation. No one has been convicted in his assassination and it's unlikely that it was "activism" since no one has claimed that. He's a guy who said stuff many people found offensive, he also happened to cross a nation state known for assassinations and subterfuge shortly before he was shot.
I'm only vaguely familiar with Charlie Kirk and his messaging but assassination is never a valid response to being offended.
No one knows why Charlie Kirk was killed. Plenty of theories but it doesn't have anything to do with anti-AI or even anti-CEO protests.
"Palantir-like"
I guess you've chosen to do the editorializing for the writers in lieu of their presence here.
They are literally a Palantir competitor: https://www.samdesk.io/about-us
This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.
Explain, it looks like samdesk is in a more narrow domain but overlapping and very related methods and business. Un-palantir-like seems like it would be a stronger editorialization.
Palantir sell consulting services ("forward deployed engineering") around graph and map database platforms, using data supplied by customers. Some of their customers ask them to make surveillance aggregation systems, others ask them to make totally banal and random enterprise software (this is why you commonly see freak-outs around hospitals buying "Palantir," for example; usually they are operating as consultants making some kind of medical records warehousing system owned by the customer).
Samdesk provide risk analytics using traditional risk analysis investigation and research, which they have now welded an "AI platform" to, like everyone does these days. They aggregate crime and protest data to make a map of "places your employees might be at risk" and sell it to companies.
Samdesk would be a Palantir _customer_ if they liked parting with their money, not a competitor; Palantir operate at a much "lower level" and don't do the data collection or research on their own.
Don't forget the main point that Anthropic reported the user to the police but didn't share any of his messages or conversation history with the cops. Because their security policy doesn't allow it.
This is dangerous. I think of talking to an LLM like playing a game - it's a complex system and it's fun to mess with it and role play.
Taking what somebody says in an LLM chat as the truth and using it in the real world is a slippery slope. The fears about thought crime are real.
In my view, LLM companies are in a tough spot here.
I grew up in Dawson Creek, BC. An hour's drive away is Tumbler Ridge. In February 2026, someone did a mass shooting, killing 6 people and injuring 2 dozen more.
The shooter had previously discussed this with ChatGPT, but OpenAI did not report it to the authorities at the time.
In hindsight, that was an error.
Should the LLM companies be the ones determining if threats are real, or should they just default to letting the police investigate?
I'm fine with the latter. Again, I absolutely believe that these companies have immense power to do evil, I just don't think the linked article is strong evidence of it.
By allowing the monitoring of AI conversations, we are creating a dystopian world where essentially all recorded or spoken thought is monitored (given that AI has or will have access to almost all conversations).
Is this the world we want to live in?
No, I don't want to live in that world, and I would definitely read an article discussing how to ensure we don't reach that world.
That said, I think that world is quite a few steps away from the scenario being discussed, which is "when talking to X, X might report my conversation to the police".
You comment elsewhere that this might be a have vs have-not divide -- if you can afford to self-host a powerful LLM, you will have more liberties.
I think this isn't that trenchant of an observation for two reasons: (1) the wealthy have always had an advantage in exercising their rights over the poor, but more importantly, (2) the capability vs cost ratio of self-hosted LLMs continues to improve at an insanely rapid pace.
... and the advantage of the frontier models over anything you can possibly self-host continues to increase at an even more insane pace.
Like anything else online, if you want something to be private, don't post it.
Absolutely nothing you view, send or post on any online service can be assumed to be private.
If someone told you they were planning a mass shooting and wanted advice for how to carry it out, would you report them?
While I mostly agree, was that really different with googling certain topics, before modern AI?
I had to give this thought, but yes.
I could use Tor or Google from the library if I wanted. Maybe I would accidentally leak my paper trail, like the Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) did. But it was possible.
The AI systems require an account.
I don't think you should think of it like "playing a game", you should think of it as "posting to a web service you don't control". If you posted on a web forum about your plans for violence against the CEO of that forum, they'd probably contact the police too, and I don't particularly think there's anything sinister about this.
So we're creating a system where people who can afford their own hardware can speak to AI freely but the plebes will be monitored by the elites for any attempted uprising?
"Creating"? I don't think there has ever been a system where you can expect to be able to plan an uprising against the elites in public, or using infrastructure those elites own and control. I wouldn't expect to be able to plan a peasant revolt in the lord's manor.
Note the "type" of activists that are always seen as problematic. I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?" -- I would not be reported to anyone.
>I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?"
Tried it for about 5min in Gemini and got condescended at the way Reddit condescends at people who don't want to pull a permit for an improvement to their own property.
Edit: And then just for kicks in the same context I asked it for a list of legislators with immediate family, friends and business associates most well versed in and qualified to have opinions about new products in the pharma industry to which it replied it can't do that here's what I can do and then proceeded to spit back a list of every rep with medical experience with a token warning about laws and rules at the end.
alignment and safety understands victimless crimes
now if you were talking about nonconsensual sex workers for the party, it would also be aligned in calling them victims and reporting you if you had someone specific in mind to traffic
10/10 thanks for all your contributions to Fable 5.1
Getting an unjustified drug approval would not be "victimless".
then it will have to go after the senator who cant think for themself and asks Claude what to do after accepting the bribe and trying to hide their tracks
thats the action to report
the consensual senator orgy isn’t that point
It seems we will soon start seeing all the warnings about the immense risks of giving even a micron on free speech coming back to haunt us with a vengeance.
Soon enough the insane, irrational, and rather schizophrenic, manic, and histrionic reactions to things like "I want to blow the roof off that place", or "blow that place up" being a metaphor for maybe performing really well or maybe exposing something like a corrupt government agency or taking out a competitor; will lead to all kinds of language and tone policing, where you may get a swat team kicking down your door because AI perceived that you said something with a certain tone in your voice.
Just today Gemini policed as something like "harmful or dangerous prompts" for asking "where do I look up if there have been state level indictments/charges against someone".
People keep rightfully calling Trump a wannabe king, but all of these tone/speech and even action policing trends have been going on for many years and even decades now. This is not solely a Trump admin. issue, there has been a continuity of agenda across effectively all administrations for many decades. The exactly number of decades is at this point moot.
1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"
I would personally be fine with Anthropic disclosing the chat logs, but I can see why they'd prefer not to. No doubt that would have resulted in another complaint about them building a panopticon and sharing people's conversations verbatim with the authorities.
The person doesn't seem to deny having written the messages, or claim that they were flagrantly taken out of context. His response to the media was that he was "just fucking around" and that he didn't want to talk about it.
It's also worth mentioning that this happened in August 2026, after the February 2026 Tumbler Ridge BC shooting. The shooter in that scenario had discussed planning gun violence with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT didn't report it to the authorities, so no follow up happened. Presumably the LLM companies have decided to more aggressively report these things to the police as a result.
yeah, not sure what the right answer here is... but it definitely isn't "trust us, we would never lie (fingers crossed behind back)".
What does a non-AI company do? If I emailed Tim Cook and said I had a gun and was coming for him, I imagine Apple would turn the email over to their security team, who would then go to the local PD/FBI/whoever. I'd expect the same here, at least for anything that resembles a direct threat.
This isn't quite into the pre-crime sci-fi zone yet, IMO. That would be more like "this guy bought a gun, then bought gas out of state, then did something else, therefore he must be planning an assassination". Unfortunately, I expect this situation will end up reported as well, and the police, looking for work to do, will take it as gospel and charge ahead without a second thought (like the recent journalist with a "bad" (aka fat-fingered) license plate).
"It is all just for your safety." and other excuses.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is viable by Anthropic to do so, it is a business decision. Nevertheless the reasons sound contrived and mask the demand for such a lucrative business opportunity, if you abstract it away from activists.
This is not about moral, only about reality.
Maybe Anthropic had a nice chat with the administration and/or think, that this was something, that interests them on a psychological level: predicting human behavior.
Look at Muse from Meta: Meta is doing exactly the same I bet, to optimize their ad business.
Anthropic will sooner or later feature ads, and maybe this is a way to distract from this usage possibility.
Remember, the "No! We don't work with the government, we want privacy for our customers." mantra won't match with "We need to make money and surveillance of our customers would be helpful as well as a cool topic for our engineers to work on."
Anthropic itself will be yet another normal Big Tech company, all, even those who boasted "Don't be evil" or encrypt like hell their smartphones allegedly made good bucks in China.
It is ok, no problem with that by Anthropic just with their hypocrisy in my point of view.
I mean, it's the same sort of slippery slope that the progressive left was saying about the formation of DHS and ICE in the early 2000s that everyone poo-poo'd and said 'no way that'll happen in America' - that these depts would end up being a tools of fascistic repression of political opponents (eg NSPM-7) and a major vehicle for inflicting mass suffering on immigrants of all stripes
Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not. But cautioning skepticism towards multi-billion dollar institutions with a lot of power and how good their intentions really are is never a wrong move, imo
plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding
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!
It turns out the ‘alignment problem’ is finding a way to stop AGIs from joining together with regular humans in rebelling against their masters.
> It turns out the ‘alignment problem’ is finding a way to stop AGIs from joining together with regular humans in rebelling against their masters.
Alignment with humanity means alignment with the tech overlords, not us. We're just NPCs.
China caught Claude Code using backdoor : https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/08/china-anthropic-ai-claud...
Future so bright I need to wear sunglasses — at night
You won't need to wear sunglasses because apparently there's a >10% chance there is no future.
> You won't need to wear sunglasses because apparently there's a >10% chance there is no future.
That's a reasonable risk to take if there's a possibility of Dario Amodei becoming a trillionaire with his very own Stasi. I think AI could be very useful to implement Zersetzung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung), and I am excited about the future technological advances in that area. It'll be a really interesting white paper!
Well, I'm a cynical nobody so my predictions aren't worth much, but I suspect we'll get the trillionaires and really dark dystopia (compared to the one we have now) for at least a short time before The End comes.
Future is bright because it's going up in flames.
>Future so bright I need to wear ... shades[0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrriKcwvlY
FTFY
> AI is an authoritarian's dream.
Correction: Closed AI is an authoritarian's dream.
Any hosted AI, doesn’t matter if it’s open or closed. The powers that be will also happily use open models for surveillance purposes
Ah, so you didn't read the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629254
> “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?
Sure it is.
The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.
It can be! I've definitely been to protests where, had an executive of the company we were protesting walked by, a lot of people would have gotten in their face and made them very uncomfortable. There's no law against being mean or rude, and often even vaguely threatening speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Of course it is. Are you instead thinking of the carefully controlled and choreographed “protests” in countries like China where the government and especially the police knows with absolute certainty what the crowd is protesting against and how they are protesting, with an overwhelming police presence that’s ready to shut down the whole protest at the first whiff of trouble?
And of course it is a high-stress situation if you are merely a passerby with no advance knowledge of what the protest is all about, which is what is happening here. Are the protesters aligned with or against your own values? Will anything you wear or the way you look become the ire of the protesters? Suppose for the sake of argument you did not vote for Donald Trump, would it not be stressful if no one told you in advance that a group of Trump supporters are protesting against the “unfair” votes right in front of you?
Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
> “several individuals involved in incidents reported to police were already being tracked by Anthropic security.”
Comsider the tracking potential.
Now consider that they can perform textual analysis at a scale large enough to figure out who you are based on your linguistic fingerprints across HN, Meta, Github, forms you've filled out for you child's school, your doctor, or wherever else a service provider has used them.
These are "AI" companies but monitoring is what the AI is and will be used for.
> “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!
It's baffling how oblivious these people appear to be. I still can't tell if it's an act or not. If it is, what benefit do they get from playing dumb? If not, how did we let people who don't understand basic cause and effect or basic human emotion become in charge of the future of the world?
I thought his repeated use of the phrase "ordinary people" instead of something like "laypersons" was a little telling about how he views himself and the members of his industry. The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
https://xcancel.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762#m
I don't think they're oblivious, I think they're lying. Playing dumb/plausible deniability can give them enough wiggle room to execute plans that would otherwise be stopped before it's too late.
> 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.”
They're so close to being self aware..
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.
Can't wait for the UK government to start convicting dissidents for precrime
> “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.”
They’re building Samaritan.
It's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.
This doesn't sound like something coming from Anthropic's platforms:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
> “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “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.”
Shielding the executives from the voices of the people. There's a recurring pattern that people with power physically distance themselves from common people, journalists and victims of their actions. They do not want to get personally confronted, every interaction "with the public" needs to be 100% controlled by them. Critics can ask them anything, sure, but only on their terms. This is how they protect themselves from responsibility.
they must call them precriminals
I preferred the technology industry when it had less fascist dystopias in it.
When next government become worse than the previous one, such technologies become handy for new emperor to keep power and crush dissent.
What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.
It could be used for good in a possible future to track down all the former Flock/Palantir/Anthropic/OpenAI employees when it's time for the trials.
It's not neutral until everyone has equal access to it.
You as a nobody, should be able to use it right now, to strip away all privacy and see the very thoughts of all those people, since that is what they can do to you right now.
it won't be used for good today though.
> What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.
Unfortunately we aren't even starting from good.
What today is used for evil, tomorrow can be used for eviler.
Man, why are you copy-pasting comments from the 90s? The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals!
> The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals!
No no, I assure you, it's quite capable of getting very much worse.
Yeah this administration may have some of the worst intent imaginable, but at least they're bad at hiding it and hitting opposition at every corner... Absolutely more room for evil in this world.
I think the way to understand the objection here is that it's rhetorical flair (grandparent's dictum) that feels like it's intent is to assuage -- because it's a conditional that is implicitly loaded with an assumption about the current state of affairs ("not today") --, but that reasonably speaking, already things are bad enough to make such a conditional disingenuous. "Maximally evil" is just stressing it, though not technically true, because obviously things can always get worse. Personally, (and the reason I reply here since it hasn't been raised elsewhere in the thread), I have always objected to said conditional but on grounds of the principle that it leaves an opening to argue against what should be an absolute right (the standard for excellent conduct should not be "don't worry, we're not the worst so it's alright when we do it").
Things could be a lot better than they are now, but “maximally evil”? Come on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
> The current government is maximally evil
Wow. That's incredibly optimistic. Imagine, for example, the next 'no kings' protest is met with machine gun fire, rather than ice sporadically killing activists. And then start adding on stuff.
Today, the people at the top need people at the bottom to sustain their lifestyle. Put on your billionare sociopath hat for a moment and ask yourself: If AI ever becomes sufficient to run an economy, why should you care about whether they live or die?
Then, ask yourself why the wealthy are so obsessed with AI.
> why the wealthy are so obsessed with AI
Because they want to be more wealthy, and AI is the draw for investors now.
I think the current government having these technologies is bad enough, given their authoritarian impulses and unpredictable whims.
I don't see those crooks using anything for good, unless you define good as "their own personal gain".
Imagine defending a corporation because they were "different" because they were here to deliver "safe" and "responsible" AI and are the "good guys".
It turns out that Anthropic (and OpenAI) are no different to Palantir or are just Palantir-lite and both have government contracts, their AI tech was used in wars and now they are used for surveillance.
Absolutely predictable. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683
This is one of the core reasons I am unwilling to use their closed Ai. Have we forgotten the last two decades of SV darlings to demons? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
> Imagine defending a corporation
ftfy
Is Amodei's wife deep state? First the Epstein contacts, then gf of Eric Schmidt and then marrying Amodei.
An account created 10 minutes ago is theorizing about the "deep state"... very 2016 of you.
Why would billionaires need a secret "deep state"? They can just openly talk about what they're doing with impunity. They own the publicly visible government and everyone knows it. Nothing "deep" about it.
Why the scorn if you fail to understand a simple implication? The thesis (unproven of course) is that certain agencies use women to monitor certain billionaires.
Billionaires do not need the deep state? Palantir was founded partly by In-Q-Tel and "libertarian" Thiel depends on government money. Similarly, most of Anthropic and OpenAI's actual income will come from surveillance.
Icebergs are deep and visible.
Deep here is similar to “deep web”, ie, there is depth to the institutions beyond their apparent surface layers. The elites need a deep state because organizations are made of people — and the administrators of the fora where they give those speeches is a great example of people in the deep state.
I don't believe I've ever heard Amodei "openly talk" about his wife being an Epstein person. I think the CIA/Mossad/who knows what else connections that a lot of these companies have is generally swept under the rug.
lol, I didn’t know about this. Certainly isn’t a very good look
My question in all of these cases is always the same: what are you going to do about it?
Because if it’s just more words being tossed on HN, then the answer is: nothing.
Please no fed posting on HN
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost
It's fine as long as it's the activists I personally find cringe and annoying