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 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.”

So they're monitoring activists outside of Anthropic's systems.

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.

Don't forget the main point that Anthropic reported the user to the police but didn't share any of his messages or conversation history with the cops. Because their security policy doesn't allow it.

Your Microsoft example is only equivalent if Microsoft was also scanning hotmail and MSN messenger for threats against the company.

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.

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.

1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"

"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.

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

plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding

Future so bright I need to wear sunglasses — at night

China caught Claude Code using backdoor : https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/08/china-anthropic-ai-claud...

It turns out the ‘alignment problem’ is finding a way to stop AGIs from joining together with regular humans in rebelling against their masters.

> AI is an authoritarian's dream.

Correction: Closed AI is an authoritarian's dream.

Ah, so you didn't read the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629254

Sure it is.

The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.

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.

Of course it is. Are you instead thinking of the carefully controlled and choreographed “protests” in countries like China where the government and especially the police knows with absolute certainty what the crowd is protesting against and how they are protesting, with an overwhelming police presence that’s ready to shut down the whole protest at the first whiff of trouble?

And of course it is a high-stress situation if you are merely a passerby with no advance knowledge of what the protest is all about, which is what is happening here. Are the protesters aligned with or against your own values? Will anything you wear or the way you look become the ire of the protesters? Suppose for the sake of argument you did not vote for Donald Trump, would it not be stressful if no one told you in advance that a group of Trump supporters are protesting against the “unfair” votes right in front of you?

Sometimes you just don’t want politics in your life and just want the equivalent of boring suburbs.

It's baffling how oblivious these people appear to be. I still can't tell if it's an act or not. If it is, what benefit do they get from playing dumb? If not, how did we let people who don't understand basic cause and effect or basic human emotion become in charge of the future of the world?

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.”

It could be used for good in a possible future to track down all the former Flock/Palantir/Anthropic/OpenAI employees when it's time for the trials.

it won't be used for good today though.

Man, why are you copy-pasting comments from the 90s? The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals!

> 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.

I think the current government having these technologies is bad enough, given their authoritarian impulses and unpredictable whims.

I don't see those crooks using anything for good, unless you define good as "their own personal gain".

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?

> Imagine defending a corporation

ftfy

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.

lol, I didn’t know about this. Certainly isn’t a very good look

Please no fed posting on HN

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost