Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

prospect.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#71

Post by urams »

slowin wrote: post #43
cldellow wrote: post #34

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 per…

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 pe…

"Palantir-like"

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

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#72

Post by yieldcrv »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
cldellow wrote: post #34

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 per…

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

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#73

Post by Analemma_ »

rottencupcakes wrote: post #61
cldellow wrote: post #34

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 per…

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.

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.

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#75

Post by rottencupcakes »

cldellow wrote: post #66
rottencupcakes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 threa…

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?

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#76

Post by SoftTalker »

laimewhisps wrote: post #68
brightball wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 k…

I'm only vaguely familiar with Charlie Kirk and his messaging but assassination is never a valid response to being offended.

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#77

Post by 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..

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#78

Post by 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.

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#79

Post by tyrabound »

cldellow wrote: post #34

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 per…

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.

Re: Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

#80

Post by laimewhisps »

urams wrote: post #71
slowin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

"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
Post reply on HN