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Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

"Palantir-like"

I guess you've chosen to do the editorializing for the writers in lieu of their presence here.

They are literally a Palantir competitor: https://www.samdesk.io/about-us

This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.

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.

Unironically yes.

Unironically oppressive: https://www.actiontogetherwest.org/bayarea

Unironically oppressive: https://indivisiblesf.org/events

Unironically oppressive: https://aroc.herokuapp.com/events/

Per you.

Again, tracking anti-AI protests to help AI executives avoid being held responsible for their company's actions is oppressive. I don't care what PR this company does to try to whitewash its image. Their actions speak louder than their propaganda.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

By "open models", do you perhaps mean the approximately trillion-parameter open models that have been getting released recently? Because basically nobody can actually self-host those. And even at that size it's debatable that they're closing the gap.

Talk to me when you can do it with a 24B model quantized to 8 bits.

> 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.

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.

> Richard Stallman was right about everything.

He might be right about this but everything is really pushing it.

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.

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?

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.

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

>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.

I don't think you've fairly summed it up. The title is more accurate than your representation

It seems we will soon start seeing all the warnings about the immense risks of giving even a micron on free speech coming back to haunt us with a vengeance.

Soon enough the insane, irrational, and rather schizophrenic, manic, and histrionic reactions to things like "I want to blow the roof off that place", or "blow that place up" being a metaphor for maybe performing really well or maybe exposing something like a corrupt government agency or taking out a competitor; will lead to all kinds of language and tone policing, where you may get a swat team kicking down your door because AI perceived that you said something with a certain tone in your voice.

Just today Gemini policed as something like "harmful or dangerous prompts" for asking "where do I look up if there have been state level indictments/charges against someone".

People keep rightfully calling Trump a wannabe king, but all of these tone/speech and even action policing trends have been going on for many years and even decades now. This is not solely a Trump admin. issue, there has been a continuity of agenda across effectively all administrations for many decades. The exactly number of decades is at this point moot.

1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"

I would personally be fine with Anthropic disclosing the chat logs, but I can see why they'd prefer not to. No doubt that would have resulted in another complaint about them building a panopticon and sharing people's conversations verbatim with the authorities.

The person doesn't seem to deny having written the messages, or claim that they were flagrantly taken out of context. His response to the media was that he was "just fucking around" and that he didn't want to talk about it.

It's also worth mentioning that this happened in August 2026, after the February 2026 Tumbler Ridge BC shooting. The shooter in that scenario had discussed planning gun violence with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT didn't report it to the authorities, so no follow up happened. Presumably the LLM companies have decided to more aggressively report these things to the police as a result.

yeah, not sure what the right answer here is... but it definitely isn't "trust us, we would never lie (fingers crossed behind back)".

What does a non-AI company do? If I emailed Tim Cook and said I had a gun and was coming for him, I imagine Apple would turn the email over to their security team, who would then go to the local PD/FBI/whoever. I'd expect the same here, at least for anything that resembles a direct threat.

This isn't quite into the pre-crime sci-fi zone yet, IMO. That would be more like "this guy bought a gun, then bought gas out of state, then did something else, therefore he must be planning an assassination". Unfortunately, I expect this situation will end up reported as well, and the police, looking for work to do, will take it as gospel and charge ahead without a second thought (like the recent journalist with a "bad" (aka fat-fingered) license plate).

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.

"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

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