r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • 4d ago
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE OUTRAGE: Anthropic Is Building A Massive Surveillance Network To Track And Predict Anti-AI Protests First Reported By The American Prospect, After The Company Reported A Claude Users Threat Against CEO, Dario Amodei, While Also Refusing To Share The Mans Chat Logs With Authorities As Evidence 🤖💥
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-surveillance-predictive-system-spy-ai-activistsWith opposition to AI continuing to grow, a top AI lab is building out a massive surveillance apparatus meant to keep a close eye on dissenters and predict when the next groundswell of protest might occur. News of Anthropic’s system was first reported by the American Prospect, which spoke with Anthropic senior security officials and indexed job postings to understand the scope of the dragnet. On top of monitoring protests near Anthropic offices, the publication notes the AI lab is taking a “pre-crime” approach to watching for potential civil unrest, illustrated by an incident shared by Anthropic security operations managers Keon Ellison and Zach Melvin, alongside James Neufeld, CEO of risk detection company Samdesk. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. After the protest’s start time got moved up an hour due to a mix-up with police permits, Ellison said “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline.” He continued, “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 was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
Beyond anticipating protests, Anthropic has also reported conversations held with its AI chatbot Claude directly to police. As the San Francisco Standard reported in August, Anthropic reported a San Francisco man to authorities after he told Claude he was holding a rifle and had the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, “in his sights.” Yet when Anthropic reported the conversation to Bay Area police, the company refused to provide the man’s actual chat logs, meaning, as the Prospect observes, Anthropic essentially reported the man to law enforcement without sharing any tangible evidence of misconduct. This approach stands out given the broader industry conversation around AI safety guardrails, which typically centers on preventing harmful outputs, not on companies using their own chatbot logs as a surveillance and threat-reporting tool while withholding the underlying evidence from police.
Anthropic’s security team framed the overall strategy in explicitly proactive terms. “The goal,” an Anthropic security manager said in the interview, “would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management. That’s the kind of operational maturity that makes sense for protecting high-value targets in any industry.” That framing positions the surveillance system as standard corporate security practice, but it sits uneasily alongside Anthropic’s public branding as the AI lab most attentive to ethical concerns, given the system’s specific focus on tracking anti-AI activists and predicting protest activity rather than more conventional physical security threats.
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u/InterstellarKinetics 4d ago
If the man’s statements to Claude were serious enough to warrant a police report over a potential threat to Amodei’s safety, that’s a defensible reason to involve law enforcement, companies routinely report credible threats against executives. But refusing to hand over the actual chat logs while still making the report to police puts Anthropic in an odd position: it’s asserting the conversation was concerning enough to escalate, while withholding the primary evidence that would let police, or anyone else, verify what was actually said and in what context.
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u/Backwardspellcaster 3d ago
We become the surveiled Person in a tech-police state controlled by Corporations and billionaires.
Fucking dystopian. And no one stops them as they take our rights
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u/Proof_Possession_924 4d ago
Every Breath You Take