Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
prospect.org
prospect.org
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".
> 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.
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.
I guess you've chosen to do the editorializing for the writers in lieu of their presence here.
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.
> 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
Unironically oppressive: https://indivisiblesf.org/events
Unironically oppressive: https://aroc.herokuapp.com/events/
Per you.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Is this the world we want to live in?
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?
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.
You didn't answer my question.
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'm not alone in that opinion.
Talk to me when you can do it with a 24B model quantized to 8 bits.
Do you think you have a choice? It's Sam, Dario, and their investors' decision about what kind of world they want to build.
He might be right about this but everything is really pushing it.
Then the law must be changed to protect the profit.
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
thats the action to report
the consensual senator orgy isn’t that point
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.”
AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!
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!
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrriKcwvlY
FTFY
I'm a peeping tom techie with X-ray eyes
Things are going great, and they're only getting better
Correction: Closed AI is an authoritarian's dream.
Alignment with humanity means alignment with the tech overlords, not us. We're just NPCs.
> 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.”
Says the guy creating a pre-crime global surveillance apparatus. Wonder why people don't trust him!
https://xcancel.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762#m
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.
> [..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,”
Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?
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.
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.
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.
The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.
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.
What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.
No no, I assure you, it's quite capable of getting very much worse.
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.
Because they want to be more wealthy, and AI is the draw for investors now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Unfortunately we aren't even starting from good.
What today is used for evil, tomorrow can be used for eviler.
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.
I don't see those crooks using anything for good, unless you define good as "their own personal gain".
They're so close to being self aware..
> 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.”
> 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.”
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’re building Samaritan.
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 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]
ftfy
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.
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.
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.
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.