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.
Well they're also actually partnering with Palantir too. Claude was the model integrated into their Maven system that helped the US military determine targets in Iran (including the Minab elementary school)
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.
Your 4D chess model of their thinking is that the risk they run of mentioning a direct competitor, that their potential customers would also be considering, is so great that the value of that comparison is dwarfed by the costs of the risk, so they don't do it. This is some next level strategic thinking.
This isn't as complicated as you're making it. Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes. Flock is similar. Do they have exactly the same business model? No. But their brand is spying on the public and protecting those in power.
> Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes.
Look at some of these "surveillance tools" that they are marketing to "oppressive regimes". Their website brags about these deeply oppressive surveillance features:
- Identifying material threats to your workforce
- Integration with Concur and your HRIS
Look at some of the "oppressive regimes" they sell to, such as the evil Amnesty International: https://imgur.com/a/U4Zef3x
We're literally commenting on an article where Samdesk flagged a public protest to Anthropic security and Anthropic employees chose to not go by it. The absolute EVIL of a public protest being avoided by people is UNSPEAKABLE. That a company would ever even consider offering information about public protests to people is OPPRESSIVE.
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.
Because tomorrow is 1 year to the day and it’s on my mind.
Hortman? Agreed. Much more attention needs to be paid to why she was killed less than a week after breaking from her party to vote for something on Trumps agenda.
That's funny that you say that about Hortman when it was Kirk who broke from the pro-Israel party line and was almost immediately eliminated. Also why are you calling him Charlie? Did you personally know him?
The far right Christian evangelist that shot Hortman was a an anti-abortion Trump supporter who shot another Minnesota legislator the same day and had papers indicating he had others targeted in addition to perhaps wanting to shoot up a No Kings protest.
His "confession" letter was rambling and nonsensical, his motivation appeared to be a belief that killing at least four democrats (any four) would be enough to shift the balance of power in the state.
Thus far, the only motive given is a confession that's been discredited and various associations to paint him in one light or another depending on the news you read.
If you follow the money, a picture starts to form.
June 9, 2025 - Melissa Hortman broke from House Democrats and cast the deciding vote to remove Medicaid/Medicare benefits from illegal immigrants. She was the only House Democrat to vote yes; the bill passed 68–65.
June 20, 2025 - News first broke that Boelter claimed Tim Walz asked him to kill Hortman and others. The claim was not found credible. The full letter was released with the federal indictment on July 15, 2025; prosecutors called it a fantasy and said they found no evidence supporting it.
December 18, 2025 - The DOJ announced investigations into Minnesota Medicaid fraud, saying it was examining 14 Medicaid-funded programs and said more than half of about $18 billion spent since 2018 was likely stolen.
December 23, 2025 - Nick Shirley first posted on X about Somali-run Minnesota daycare fraud, highlighting Quality Learning Center and claiming it received $1.9 million in CCAP funds in 2025.
December 26, 2026 - Shirley posted the full 42-minute video, I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal, visiting about 10 Somali-run centers and claiming more than $110 million in fraud in one day.
January 5, 2026 - Walz dropped his reelection campaign amid the fraud controversy and federal pressure. He said he would stay in office and focus on the work in front of him.
February 25, 2026 - The U.S. government announced it was pausing Medicaid support to Minnesota due to fraud. Vice President JD Vance and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced a temporary halt of about $259 million in Medicaid payments.
March 4, 2026 - It was publicized that members of the Walz administration were aware of and ignored reports of the fraud as early as 2019, in a House Oversight Committee interim report released the same day Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison testified. A longer final report followed on June 8, 2026.
May 21, 2026 - DOJ announced charges against 15 defendants in more than $90 million in Minnesota Medicaid and related fraud, including the first new childcare-provider cases after the April raids.
Not the person you are replying to, but I wanted to dig into this. I do not see any evidence that he celebrated this. He did decide to try and blame it Waltz though..
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.
> The Democrat Party believes everything that God hates. Like, we’re dealing with maggots, vermin, and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good.[1]
He also called for the death of Biden (because he was a "tyrant") and all surgeons of transgender people.
If he was merely trying to be offensive, then he succeeded.
If, however, he was trying to make someone fear enough for their life to preemptively defend himself from someone claiming to speak for God + using the same dehumanizing words that have preceded multiple genocides before, then he succeeded.
A "valid" response entirely depends on what you think he was apart of. If you think he was only involved in good faith debates on college campuses and getting out the vote, then obviously shooting the guy was unjustified. But he wasn't only that, so we have to struggle with what his legacy actually was and what might have driven someone to pick up a gun against him.
My point isn't to justify his killing. It's to point out that we need to learn from history so we don't blindly repeat it.
> While talking with his father over the phone on September 11, Robinson allegedly told his father that he had killed Kirk because "there is too much evil and the guy [Kirk] spreads too much hate".
That is not being offended.
That isn’t so much different from Trump‘s reasoning when he decided to blow Venezuelan boats.
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).
Ok, so the rules for someone who selfhosts vs. Hosts for others should be different? What if I provide inference services to my family members, should I monitor their interactions and report them if I find anything dangerous?
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 can still use chatgpt without an account. Maybe it will be a limited model, but for discussing/analyzing some topics it still does fine, most of the time. You just cannot code with it.
The big problem that bothers me is the ability for post-hoc justification.
Any interaction with cops will result in them curating your entire digital presence to craft a damning story about how deviant you are, for doing things like googling TNT
Every time they shoot someone now there's an entire media blitz dedicated to how that person once did something bad.
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 could 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.
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.
I don't think you've fairly summed it up. The title is more accurate than your representation
> 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.”
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.
I think I see where you're coming from, but to me, the analogy falls short.
I think it's because email has the postal system metaphor to work with: I put my letter in an envelope, the post office just forwards it. Similarly, Hotmail does not _need_ knowledge of the contents of my email to forward it to its destination. If you asked a user who had access to their email, they might reasonably expect only the recipient would.
With LLMs, it is quite clear to the user that you are interacting with _something_ that is inspecting your messages and reacting to them. If you asked the user who had access to their inputs, they'd probably say "Claude" or "Anthropic". Thus, when Claude rats them out for threatening violence, they probably wouldn't be that surprised.
To me, this feels much closer to someone phoning up Microsoft's customer support phone number and mentioning that they have a gun and know where Bill Gates lives, and that then resulting in a visit from the police. I do idly wonder if it was intentional that this user had this conversation with Claude, and not, say, with ChatGPT or Gemini.
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.
Neither did you. If you had, you wouldn't have fallen for the user's weird re-writing of it. The original title actually better represents the article than this summary. I mean how do you completely leave this out:
> 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.”
> Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. “What could have been a high-stress situation,” he said, “was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
> “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.
> The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
Not just that: The ordinary is also the trivial, while the extraordinary is the relevant. In other words a dichotomy of who does not matter... and who does. And in the words of Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
The entire class of people see themselves as better and more deserving than you. They used to at least try to be subtle about it, but there's no real social downside of just going mask-off so they don't even hide it anymore.
I think there are social downsides, which is why they want mass surveillance and to avoid being confronted by the people who don't agree that they are our "betters".
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.
> “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.
Corporate execs spend a lot of money and hire people to keep them insulated from the general public and our pesky opinions. If they had everything their way, they'd have exclusive access to their own roads and public spaces so that they didn't ever have to see or interact with us at all.
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.
> 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?
No. There will most likely be a way to get around or through the crowd. The article talks about a protest and not an angry mob.
> Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
At this point AI is a highly political topic and people turn up at a protest, specially because they can't avoid the negative effects of AI in their personal lives.
> There will most likely be a way to get around or through the crowd.
That’s exactly what the article said what the Anthropic executive did: get into the hotel through a service entrance. So you support and would do what the Anthropic executive did as well.
I don't think most other large corporations have a system to automatically warn them of protests against them and reroute their executives to avoid those protests
I think the article pretty clearly states its not just within their own platform
> 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.”
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.”
> 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.”
> “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.
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.
> “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.
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.
Palantir's Maven system integrated Claude as its model for determining targets to bomb in Iran. That's what led to the triple tap strike on the Minab elementary school
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.
Good analogy. I was being a bit knee-jerk in my response. Of course there must be layers to the network of elites that we can't see.
My frustration with comments like the one I responded to is from seeing ones like it for over a decade now... brand new account, first and only comment is theorizing about conspiracies. Contributing to an environment of paranoia-posting about whose wife is or isn't a CIA asset, instead of talking about the actual article - which is glaringly public information that's scary enough WITHOUT also talking about the "deep state."
I don't care if the Anthropic CEO's wife is an intelligence asset or a garden-variety money chaser and I think it's useless and annoying to talk about. Especially on a technology forum. When a 10-minute-old account does it, it screams astroturfing. But maybe I'm just jaded.
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.
and they want to push us to use tracked autonomous cars with "alcohol safety" so that we can be tracked all the time but amodei can't be after they extract all our water and resources and hold our government hostage. wanna authoritarian clowns.
Is there a name for names that designate the exact opposite of what they convey? Examples are OpenAI, Free range chicken, "People's Republic" of China; and now Anthropic.
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.
Yes, obviously nothing bad ever happens when someone walks out into an emotional crowd of people who hate them.
Bad for who? I absolutely want people violating my rights to be confronted, regularly.
How are your rights being violated?
I'm sure you have a solid and thought-out answer that justifies such a casual attitude towards violence.
> such a casual attitude towards violence.
How is protest violence?
I'm being surveilled and profiled by these companies. Let their CEOs feel maximum heat.
"Palantir-like"
I guess you've chosen to do the editorializing for the writers in lieu of their presence here.
Well they're also actually partnering with Palantir too. Claude was the model integrated into their Maven system that helped the US military determine targets in Iran (including the Minab elementary school)
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.
If by "overlapping and very related methods" you mean "use any form of data analysis whatsoever" then, yup, they are basically the same company.
If I heard Palantir-like I wouldn't assume something like a perfect mirror competitor company.
They are literally a Palantir competitor: https://www.samdesk.io/about-us
Weird that they don't compare themselves to Palantir then!
https://imgur.com/a/eKAQKSN
Why would you take any of these companies at their word? They know Palantir is toxic.
Your 4D chess model of their thinking is that the risk they run of mentioning a direct competitor, that their potential customers would also be considering, is so great that the value of that comparison is dwarfed by the costs of the risk, so they don't do it. This is some next level strategic thinking.
I have to wonder, though, why doesn't Palantir mention them? https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apalantir.com+samdesk
They seem to mention actual competitors: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apalantir.com+c3
Given your 4D chess logic, they really should be mentioning all their competitors to poison their wells.
This isn't as complicated as you're making it. Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes. Flock is similar. Do they have exactly the same business model? No. But their brand is spying on the public and protecting those in power.
"Motte? Meet Bailey."
> Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes.
Look at some of these "surveillance tools" that they are marketing to "oppressive regimes". Their website brags about these deeply oppressive surveillance features:
- Identifying material threats to your workforce - Integration with Concur and your HRIS
Look at some of the "oppressive regimes" they sell to, such as the evil Amnesty International: https://imgur.com/a/U4Zef3x
We're literally commenting on an article where this company tracked anti-AI activists and Anthropic actioned on that.
We're literally commenting on an article where Samdesk flagged a public protest to Anthropic security and Anthropic employees chose to not go by it. The absolute EVIL of a public protest being avoided by people is UNSPEAKABLE. That a company would ever even consider offering information about public protests to people is OPPRESSIVE.
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.
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.
Why emphasize Charlie Kirk‘s death?
What about Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark killed earlier in the same year?
It’s still people like Kirk who are against effective gun control.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,”
Why Charlie?
Because tomorrow is 1 year to the day and it’s on my mind.
Hortman? Agreed. Much more attention needs to be paid to why she was killed less than a week after breaking from her party to vote for something on Trumps agenda.
That's funny that you say that about Hortman when it was Kirk who broke from the pro-Israel party line and was almost immediately eliminated. Also why are you calling him Charlie? Did you personally know him?
His name is Charlie Kirk. I don't always use people's full names to refer to them?
The far right Christian evangelist that shot Hortman was a an anti-abortion Trump supporter who shot another Minnesota legislator the same day and had papers indicating he had others targeted in addition to perhaps wanting to shoot up a No Kings protest.
His "confession" letter was rambling and nonsensical, his motivation appeared to be a belief that killing at least four democrats (any four) would be enough to shift the balance of power in the state.
Thus far, the only motive given is a confession that's been discredited and various associations to paint him in one light or another depending on the news you read.
If you follow the money, a picture starts to form.
June 9, 2025 - Melissa Hortman broke from House Democrats and cast the deciding vote to remove Medicaid/Medicare benefits from illegal immigrants. She was the only House Democrat to vote yes; the bill passed 68–65.
https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-budget-deal-undocumente...
June 14, 2025 - Hortman was killed, along with her husband Mark, at their Brooklyn Park home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/minnesota-lawmakers-ma...
June 15, 2025 - Her killer, Vance Boelter, was caught near Green Isle, Minnesota, after a roughly 43-hour manhunt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/minnesota-lawmakers-ma...
June 20, 2025 - News first broke that Boelter claimed Tim Walz asked him to kill Hortman and others. The claim was not found credible. The full letter was released with the federal indictment on July 15, 2025; prosecutors called it a fantasy and said they found no evidence supporting it.
https://www.startribune.com/vance-boelter-letter-klobuchar-w...
December 18, 2025 - The DOJ announced investigations into Minnesota Medicaid fraud, saying it was examining 14 Medicaid-funded programs and said more than half of about $18 billion spent since 2018 was likely stolen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/us/minnesota-fraud-scanda...
December 23, 2025 - Nick Shirley first posted on X about Somali-run Minnesota daycare fraud, highlighting Quality Learning Center and claiming it received $1.9 million in CCAP funds in 2025.
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2003542404440404302 (5.4 million views)
December 26, 2026 - Shirley posted the full 42-minute video, I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal, visiting about 10 Somali-run centers and claiming more than $110 million in fraud in one day.
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123 (144.1 million views)
January 5, 2026 - Walz dropped his reelection campaign amid the fraud controversy and federal pressure. He said he would stay in office and focus on the work in front of him.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/05/us/minnesota-child-care-fraud...
February 25, 2026 - The U.S. government announced it was pausing Medicaid support to Minnesota due to fraud. Vice President JD Vance and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced a temporary halt of about $259 million in Medicaid payments.
https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-medicaid-funding-fraud-...
March 4, 2026 - It was publicized that members of the Walz administration were aware of and ignored reports of the fraud as early as 2019, in a House Oversight Committee interim report released the same day Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison testified. A longer final report followed on June 8, 2026.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/house-oversight-commi...
May 21, 2026 - DOJ announced charges against 15 defendants in more than $90 million in Minnesota Medicaid and related fraud, including the first new childcare-provider cases after the April raids.
https://www.twincities.com/2026/05/21/minnesota-fraud-new-ch...
Dark corners?!?
The president of the US celebrated the killing of State senator Hortman.
The fish rots at the head.
I think I missed this one (or lost in the flood of news). Got a link?
All I can find now is him pushing conspiracy theories about it.
Him actually celebrating would be the sort of thing that might convince some MAGA leaning folks I know to change their mind.
Not the person you are replying to, but I wanted to dig into this. I do not see any evidence that he celebrated this. He did decide to try and blame it Waltz though..
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/04/trump-circulates-fa...
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1158335374671...
The guy who killed her claimed Tim Waltz put him up to it. It wasn’t found to be credible.
Melissa Hortman died less than a week after voting against her party to support something on Trumps agenda.
And? You're suggesting she was assassinated for voting for Trump supported legislation, by a Trump supporter?
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.
> The Democrat Party believes everything that God hates. Like, we’re dealing with maggots, vermin, and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good.[1]
He also called for the death of Biden (because he was a "tyrant") and all surgeons of transgender people.
If he was merely trying to be offensive, then he succeeded.
If, however, he was trying to make someone fear enough for their life to preemptively defend himself from someone claiming to speak for God + using the same dehumanizing words that have preceded multiple genocides before, then he succeeded.
A "valid" response entirely depends on what you think he was apart of. If you think he was only involved in good faith debates on college campuses and getting out the vote, then obviously shooting the guy was unjustified. But he wasn't only that, so we have to struggle with what his legacy actually was and what might have driven someone to pick up a gun against him.
My point isn't to justify his killing. It's to point out that we need to learn from history so we don't blindly repeat it.
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-refer...
His entire life is on video. Please pull direct quotes for any of that.
I watched in the aftermath of his death as all of these horrible things he supposedly said were paraded around. Every one was manipulated nonsense.
The machine hated Charlie for telling the truth and people were listening.
Charlie Kirk, the trans activist? never heard of her.
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.
> While talking with his father over the phone on September 11, Robinson allegedly told his father that he had killed Kirk because "there is too much evil and the guy [Kirk] spreads too much hate".
That is not being offended.
That isn’t so much different from Trump‘s reasoning when he decided to blow Venezuelan boats.
I think having health insurance denied isn't "being offended" but more akin to being killed.
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?
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?
So do you think offline language models should be outlawed or restricted?
I don't know how you inferred that. I said nothing about restricting offline computing.
Ok, so the rules for someone who selfhosts vs. Hosts for others should be different? What if I provide inference services to my family members, should I monitor their interactions and report them if I find anything dangerous?
It's more about what I can expect.
If I keep a diary offline on paper I can expect that to be private.
If I keep a diary on a hosted diary-as-a-service, I cannot.
Many people have different expectations. Isn't that what this whole conversation is about?
You didn't answer my question.
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.
It's my perspective that open models are closing the gap faster than the frontier is widening it.
I'm not alone in that opinion.
> Is this the world we want to live in?
Do you think you have a choice? It's Sam, Dario, and their investors' decision about what kind of world they want to build.
The legal fallout from LLMs becoming spy will overwhelm any profit from these misguided attempts at short lived contracts.
> The legal fallout from LLMs becoming spy will overwhelm any profit from these misguided attempts at short lived contracts.
Then the law must be changed to protect the profit.
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 can still use chatgpt without an account. Maybe it will be a limited model, but for discussing/analyzing some topics it still does fine, most of the time. You just cannot code with it.
The big problem that bothers me is the ability for post-hoc justification.
Any interaction with cops will result in them curating your entire digital presence to craft a damning story about how deviant you are, for doing things like googling TNT
Every time they shoot someone now there's an entire media blitz dedicated to how that person once did something bad.
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?
> Richard Stallman was right about everything.
He might be right about this but everything is really pushing it.
"Creating"? I don't think there has ever been a system where you could 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.
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.
How would you amend the policy?
I don't think you've fairly summed it up. The title is more accurate than your representation
> 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.”
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.
Your Microsoft example is only equivalent if Microsoft was also scanning hotmail and MSN messenger for threats against the company.
I think I see where you're coming from, but to me, the analogy falls short.
I think it's because email has the postal system metaphor to work with: I put my letter in an envelope, the post office just forwards it. Similarly, Hotmail does not _need_ knowledge of the contents of my email to forward it to its destination. If you asked a user who had access to their email, they might reasonably expect only the recipient would.
With LLMs, it is quite clear to the user that you are interacting with _something_ that is inspecting your messages and reacting to them. If you asked the user who had access to their inputs, they'd probably say "Claude" or "Anthropic". Thus, when Claude rats them out for threatening violence, they probably wouldn't be that surprised.
To me, this feels much closer to someone phoning up Microsoft's customer support phone number and mentioning that they have a gun and know where Bill Gates lives, and that then resulting in a visit from the police. I do idly wonder if it was intentional that this user had this conversation with Claude, and not, say, with ChatGPT or Gemini.
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIUrshGwgDI
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
forgot about this verse:
I'm a peeping tom techie with X-ray eyes
Things are going great, and they're only getting better
China caught Claude Code using backdoor : https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/08/china-anthropic-ai-claud...
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.
> 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
Neither did you. If you had, you wouldn't have fallen for the user's weird re-writing of it. The original title actually better represents the article than this summary. I mean how do you completely leave this out:
> 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.”
> Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. “What could have been a high-stress situation,” he said, “was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
> “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
> The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
Not just that: The ordinary is also the trivial, while the extraordinary is the relevant. In other words a dichotomy of who does not matter... and who does. And in the words of Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The entire class of people see themselves as better and more deserving than you. They used to at least try to be subtle about it, but there's no real social downside of just going mask-off so they don't even hide it anymore.
I think there are social downsides, which is why they want mass surveillance and to avoid being confronted by the people who don't agree that they are our "betters".
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.
> “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.
Corporate execs spend a lot of money and hire people to keep them insulated from the general public and our pesky opinions. If they had everything their way, they'd have exclusive access to their own roads and public spaces so that they didn't ever have to see or interact with us at all.
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.
> 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?
No. There will most likely be a way to get around or through the crowd. The article talks about a protest and not an angry mob.
> Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
At this point AI is a highly political topic and people turn up at a protest, specially because they can't avoid the negative effects of AI in their personal lives.
> There will most likely be a way to get around or through the crowd.
That’s exactly what the article said what the Anthropic executive did: get into the hotel through a service entrance. So you support and would do what the Anthropic executive did as well.
He evaded interactions with the crowd completely. That's not the same as walking around them.
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.
I don't think most other large corporations have a system to automatically warn them of protests against them and reroute their executives to avoid those protests
Can't wait for the UK government to start convicting dissidents for precrime
It's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.
I think the article pretty clearly states its not just within their own platform
> 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.”
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.”
> 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..
> “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.”
They’re building Samaritan.
> “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.
Seriously? No one said "the first step in Roko's Basilisk"???
Power corrupts. The more power something holds, the harder it is to resist corruption.
they must call them precriminals
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.
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
I am not yet waiting for my turn into the gas chamber.
> 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.
> 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.
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".
> “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.
I preferred the technology industry when it had less fascist dystopias in it.
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
Palantir's Maven system integrated Claude as its model for determining targets to bomb in Iran. That's what led to the triple tap strike on the Minab elementary school
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.
Good analogy. I was being a bit knee-jerk in my response. Of course there must be layers to the network of elites that we can't see.
My frustration with comments like the one I responded to is from seeing ones like it for over a decade now... brand new account, first and only comment is theorizing about conspiracies. Contributing to an environment of paranoia-posting about whose wife is or isn't a CIA asset, instead of talking about the actual article - which is glaringly public information that's scary enough WITHOUT also talking about the "deep state."
I don't care if the Anthropic CEO's wife is an intelligence asset or a garden-variety money chaser and I think it's useless and annoying to talk about. Especially on a technology forum. When a 10-minute-old account does it, it screams astroturfing. But maybe I'm just jaded.
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
It's fine as long as it's the activists I personally find cringe and annoying
and they want to push us to use tracked autonomous cars with "alcohol safety" so that we can be tracked all the time but amodei can't be after they extract all our water and resources and hold our government hostage. wanna authoritarian clowns.
Is there a name for names that designate the exact opposite of what they convey? Examples are OpenAI, Free range chicken, "People's Republic" of China; and now Anthropic.
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