Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

rvz

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

varispeed

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.

palmotea

Remember guys: Anthropic are the good guys! They care about morals, alignment, and safety! So this invasive surveillance to crush dissent must be good for us! AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!

12936

Is Amodei's wife deep state? First the Epstein contacts, then gf of Eric Schmidt and then marrying Amodei.

valvix

It's fine as long as it's the activists I personally find cringe and annoying

hyperbolablabla

Can't wait for the UK government to start convicting dissidents for precrime

smalltorch

It's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.

vaylian

> “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.” > [..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,” Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?

woah

Sorry to spoil the party in here, but is this different than the security that any large corporation has? The headline anecdote is about them re-routing executives around a protest based on information from a publicly filed permit. The other anecdote is about them reporting a user who made a death threat.

cldellow

The editorializing in this article is quite something. If I strip out the editorializing, I think the conclusions are: 1. Someone told Claude they had an AR-15 and the CEO of Anthropic was "in their sights". Anthropic reported this to the police. 2. Anthropic contracts with a security agency. 3. Anthropic is looking to build in-house capability for security. Anthropic clearly has high-value targets (see, e.g. the person with the AR-15 from point 1). When I worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, they also had in-house security to investigate threats against facilities and executives. I would believe Anthropic is doing evil things, but I don't think this article actually makes that claim, despite the bombast about "pre-crime".

setnone

they must call them precriminals

slowin

> “I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust … I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Says the guy creating a pre-crime global surveillance apparatus. Wonder why people don't trust him!

logans_gun

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.

sdcfgy

I preferred the technology industry when it had less fascist dystopias in it.

throwup238

> “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.” They’re building Samaritan.

bilekas

> 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..

emsign

> “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.

quantified

> “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.

Charly_HW

Power corrupts. The more power something holds, the harder it is to resist corruption.

demo4567

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.