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Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

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

#101

Post by croes »

brightball wrote: post #60
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…

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,”

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

#102

Post by addled »

woodgala wrote: post #94
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.

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.

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

#103

Post by 4d4m »

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.

The legal fallout from LLMs becoming spy will overwhelm any profit from these misguided attempts at short lived contracts.

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

#104

Post by croes »

SoftTalker wrote: post #76
laimewhisps wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#105

Post by palmotea »

4d4m wrote: post #103
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.

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.

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

#106

Post by palmotea »

rottencupcakes wrote: post #75
cldellow wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

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

#109

Post by ryandrake »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32
vaylian wrote: post #26

> “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.

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

#110

Post by satellites »

zmgsabst wrote: post #31
satellites wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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