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.
This is one of the core reasons I am unwilling to use their closed Ai. Have we forgotten the last two decades of SV darlings to demons? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes?
Palantir's Maven system integrated Claude as its model for determining targets to bomb in Iran. That's what led to the triple tap strike on the Minab elementary school
It's not neutral until everyone has equal access to it.
You as a nobody, should be able to use it right now, to strip away all privacy and see the very thoughts of all those people, since that is what they can do to you right now.
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!
Neither did you. If you had, you wouldn't have fallen for the user's weird re-writing of it. The original title actually better represents the article than this summary. I mean how do you completely leave this out:
> 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.”
> Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. “What could have been a high-stress situation,” he said, “was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
> “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.
> Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.
At this point AI is a highly political topic and people turn up at a protest, specially because they can't avoid the negative effects of AI in their personal lives.
> There will most likely be a way to get around or through the crowd.
That’s exactly what the article said what the Anthropic executive did: get into the hotel through a service entrance. So you support and would do what the Anthropic executive did as well.
This doesn't sound like something coming from Anthropic's platforms:
> 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.”
I think the article pretty clearly states its not just within their own platform
> 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.”
I don't think most other large corporations have a system to automatically warn them of protests against them and reroute their executives to avoid those protests
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".
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
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.
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
>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.
"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.
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 bet 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.
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.
I don't think you've fairly summed it up. The title is more accurate than your representation
> 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.”
> “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!
> 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.”
> “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.
> “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.
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.
Is there a name for names that designate the exact opposite of what they convey? Examples are OpenAI, Free range chicken, "People's Republic" of China; and now Anthropic.
65 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 5.4 ms ] threadIt 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
ftfy
What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.
Unfortunately we aren't even starting from good.
What today is used for evil, tomorrow can be used for eviler.
You as a nobody, should be able to use it right now, to strip away all privacy and see the very thoughts of all those people, since that is what they can do to you right now.
I don't see those crooks using anything for good, unless you define good as "their own personal gain".
AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!
Correction: Closed AI is an authoritarian's dream.
> 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.”
> Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. “What could have been a high-stress situation,” he said, “was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
> [..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,”
Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?
At this point AI is a highly political topic and people turn up at a protest, specially because they can't avoid the negative effects of AI in their personal lives.
That’s exactly what the article said what the Anthropic executive did: get into the hotel through a service entrance. So you support and would do what the Anthropic executive did as well.
The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.
> 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.”
> 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.”
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.
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".
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 bet 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.
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.
> 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.”
Says the guy creating a pre-crime global surveillance apparatus. Wonder why people don't trust him!
Because if it’s just more words being tossed on HN, then the answer is: nothing.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost
They’re building Samaritan.
They're so close to being self aware..
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.
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.