Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelligence-surveillance-system-monitor-activists/

570 points · 84 comments · view on lemmy.world

84 Comments

Dryad@lemmy.world · 148 pts · 23h (5 replies)

This is exactly what “I have nothing to hide” should sound exceedingly thin. If “knowledge is power”, then they already have power over you. It will start with “activists“ for “safety purposes,” just like flock, but it ends in totalitarianism.

“A republic, if we can keep it.”

Rhaedas@fedia.io · 81 pts · 23h (3 replies)

"I have nothing to hide."

So a camera in your bathroom.

"Why would that be anyone else's business except my own?"

Exactly.

hneerqe@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 21h (1 reply)

They're literally dumb walking into Minority Report and all the other distopian movies. What would you expect.

belochka@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 21h

They are smart walking into that. They want exactly that. It's you for whom it's a dystopia.

Honestly I no longer hope for propagation of such abilities to create feedbacks negating them.

Seems to be too much power on the side of centralizing them and using them to build perfect totalitarianism with no laws, because administrative rule doesn't require laws, just decisions. Laws are required in systems with some power balance depending on common agreement.

At the same time there's the much slower feedback loop of societies built that way degrading in the span of decades and societies preserving some competitiveness of will progressing. Except this will work as very slow evolutionary selection between shades of the former, because the latter won't survive the initial stage.

yestalgia@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 19h

I used this example on my parents. They asked, "Why would there be a camera in my bathroom?" I'm not sure if they ever connected the dots to this day.

monkeyFromTheLake@programming.dev · 1 pts · 10h

As if activists where bad people who want to hurt society. As if activists where terrorist.

verily@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 77 pts · 20h (1 reply)

while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.

Anthropic's apparent game plan:

  1. Get a list of anti-AI advocates
  2. Swat them
  3. Refuse to show evidence of claims
StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 18h

JFC. I disapprove of all AI companies, but I struggle to gauge how awful Anthropic truly is.

abbiistabbii@piefed.blahaj.zone · 75 pts · 21h (20 replies)

I don't want to be all "I told you so" but I have been saying they're building all these data centers for surveillance reasons for a while now. Like people aren't using LLMs enough for any reason to justify all the data centers and the numbers aren't growing, but Surveillance Data? That's always growing.

Ferrous@lemmy.ml · 35 pts · 21h (3 replies)

Yup. It's a scary time. You take some LinkedIn data, some Walmart shopping habits, a Spotify user catalog, a Google timeline, combined with Flock footage - mix it all together with "AI" - and suddenly you've got an extremely detailed profile of any individual you want. And we're only in the early stages. That is, spying, prediction, eavesdropping... The only logical conclusion to the surveillance apparatus is an evolution towards an apparatus for control. And it will be the most sinister, subtle, and undetectable type of coercion imaginable.

I just want to grill for gods sake.

DrakeAlbrecht@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 19h (2 replies)

mix it all together with "AI"

And this is the biggest problem of all. Nobody can explain why the AI picked a specific record to escalate its "suspicion". Nobody is accountable when it picks the wrong person, or when it creates suspicion without any actual wrongdoing taking place.

Doomsider@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 16h

All the better when they start going after whoever they want because "AI" said so. The reality is this is just the excuse they were looking for.

Lying AI decided to pull you over today sir, would you mind telling me why?

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 9h

Knowing you can be disappeared any time, even if you do nothing wrong, will certainly keep you down, and subservient.

I bet that's what Epsteins experiments were...torturing and breaking children in various ways to see at what point they would co-operate with anything, including their own deaths.

CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml · 15 pts · 17h (6 replies)

I heard someone say the other day that most of the time when there's a 'bad' technology it starts off as something good that everyone likes, and gradually becomes bad over time, like social media. But AI is something a bit more rare in that it came out and the majority of people didn't especially want or like it, but it really feels like it's being 'forced' into existence, so to speak. Which makes me think there's something else going on.

DeadDigger@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 14h (4 replies)

That's just because it's your bubble AI was used excessively before with stuff like deepl for translation, dragon speak for speech to text, in medicine it was used all the time for images, like CT or met scans and a lot in ultrasound. Further most vocaloids are basically AI too.

tyler@programming.dev · 3 pts · 12h (2 replies)

Anyone talking about AI in any context in a normal forum nowadays is discussing LLMs. Nobody cared about machine learning or neural nets that were actually being used for their designed purpose.

darthelmet@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 11h

I cared. Feelsbadman

Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 11h

Yeah ml has a lot of good uses and purposes.

flandish@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8h

i tend to call that stuff “ML” (machine learning) instead if AI thanks to the dumbass marketing of today. been working in ML for decades.

XiELEd@piefed.social · 1 pts · 16h

I did remember that people did sorta liked it during the days it was still just AI Dungeon and AI-Generated anime girls. Though AI has always been around, being used for simple chatbots (remember BEN Drowned Cleverbot?)

pdxfed@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 16h

People talk shit about Palantir's valuation but if it's the new Stasi OS, it's relatively cheap looking forward to a totalitarian police state.

tyler@programming.dev · 1 pts · 12h (7 replies)

They’re definitely not. Hard drives use a fraction of the energy a single LLM prompt does. A study calculated that every 100 words uses an entire water bottle’s worth of water. That’s a lot of cooling for 100 words. It’s very likely that these companies use several gpus for every single prompt, meaning huge servers for just a few users.

Meanwhile the internet archive has archived a significant portion of the internet with nary a data center in sight.

You can compress video. You can’t compress the energy needed to generate output.

bountygiver@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 11h (4 replies)

All the hard drive do is storing the data, they do need the data centers to comb through them for any patterns they deemed to be a threat to them

tyler@programming.dev · 3 pts · 11h (3 replies)

Which still doesn’t require as much energy as LLMs do. I run exactly that on my own server at home. And my unifi system does it on video all locally with no GPU at all. Video processing for identification is incredibly cheap and easy from a computer processing standpoint these days. You literally can do it on a raspberry pi.

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 9h (1 reply)

What on Earth are you doing that for...

tyler@programming.dev · 2 pts · 2h

What on earth am I doing what for?

bountygiver@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 10h

And? It doesn't matter what solution is optimal. The only thing matters is this is the solution their rich friends sold them.

flandish@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 8h (1 reply)

just fyi the internet archive storage is most definitely in a data center or 3. your hospitals use data centers, schools too. just not at the scale of ai types.

tyler@programming.dev · 0 pts · 2h

The Internet archive doesn’t have an entire data center just for archiving is what I’m saying. Not that they don’t use data centers.

Doomsider@lemmy.world · 66 pts · 16h (7 replies)

Not rapists, child molesters, kidnappers, murderers, human traffickers, spies, or terrorists!? They are going after activists... Yeah they are fucking evil and know it.

boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 33 pts · 13h (3 replies)

Well the part of the article that quotes the actual job listing:

Part of that role, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, will be to “identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends, including deep-dive research and OSINT collection on specific threats, actors, and events” (emphasis added).

But yeah, not a good look especially if you consider who decides what "terrorism" and "crime" mean in the US right now.

And now for a tangent I wrote that you can just skip if you're not interested:

The part about specifically tracking AI activists was that they watch for anti-AI protests anywhere where their executives go so they know to stay out of the way, but... How do they not realize that they've brought this upon themselves? Market AI as "doing everyone's job" and "super dangerous" and of course people will be pissed at you. Dario himself is the one constantly parroting how the next Claude model is so dangerous it needs to be kept in adamantium chains and whatnot. Like your industry is already pissing people off with the data centers and the cost of computer parts, why you gotta tell everyone you're working to put us all out of jobs?

Jfc I'm a software engineer with no marketing or PR experience and I think even I could do better PR than all these companies supposedly worth billions. If OpenAI is already farming outrage, just position yourself as the more responsible alternative and you'll still get sales without your execs needing to fear for your lives... Occasionally release a smaller, less capable version of Claude as open weight to win mindshare among developers, the people actually burning tons of tokens right now. Like Alibaba does with Qwen, just don't release the full size model like Alibaba does if you're afraid people are going to run it in competition with you.

Doomsider@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 13h

Thanks for the additional information.

I am very suspicious because I saw a flock video (I know, different company) where they just happened to be training on a No King's protest. I am sure it is just a coincidence /s

You are correct as US terrorism is now exclusively trans, anti-fascists, and a leftwing problem. It is obviously going to be problematic having anyone, let alone the fucking psychopath they will hire for this job be the "AI whisperer".

You cannot audit a decision made by current LLM AI. This means you can't even guarantee it was the AI that said it. For all we know someone could be on a terminal somewhere thousands of miles away providing the answer.

Companies consistently lie about what they do. It would be a mistake to believe it is just to save a CEO from having to deal with a protester. Furthermore, this is a violation of other people's rights to privacy. They don't have the authorization to track people as a private company. They are already openly violating the law and extremely unethical. I see no reason to trust them.

They certainly have the money for PR so why haven't they been flexing this muscle? I think the answer is they know they don't have to. They don't care about public opinion because they already know they will get what they want and public opinion doesn't matter.

douglasg14b@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 12h

Damn, and only for $180-$230k/y?

That's highway robbery salary for employment in an industry as ripe as that, somehow makes me like them even less.

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 9h

Considering all the stuff I did, unlike a human, this AI is putting me on the top of the list.

Was nice knowing you all.

kat_angstrom@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 15h (2 replies)

This, right here, needs to be a rallying cry. They're not interested in making the world a better place, they're creating the infrastructure to help support and maintain fascism.

dgriffith@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 11h (1 reply)

"There will be a period of change and temporary disruption. But then, after that, we will be living in utopia!"

- said every dictator ever.

TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 11h

A utopia for the dictators, sure.

Flower@sh.itjust.works · 54 pts · 23h (3 replies)

That was expected. It was the only use for AI right now that might be profitable.

CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 22h (2 replies)

I’ve been saying it forever, THIS is why they are building giant data centers. Not to sell AI to the masses. To control the masses.

belochka@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 21h (1 reply)

Already doing it. Such things being openly marketed and discussed in news mean only that they are commonplace for all the governments having the money.

Notice how Web's popularity and stagnation coincided with stagnation of politics. It seems to be natural, but there is the undercurrent, I think, of civil societies having become more predictable and invisibly regulated.

Well, I mean, in the initial stage the ground was ours, and then it was theirs, and then it was ours again, and then the somewhat longer period of it being theirs started and it is still so. Things change. Not always for worse. People sometimes feel as if the last flip of the coin were the last flip of the coin, period. That's usually wrong.

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 9h

With these people in power, humanity is functionaly extinct.

Master167@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 13h (1 reply)

Wasn't this the macguffin that Captain America blew up Shield to stop?

veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 11h

We should do more of that, yeah. Conveniently, the nazi SHIELD CEO of the whole thing died in the building as a result. Just sayin'.

AzuranAurora@piefed.ca · 26 pts · 15h

Anthropic needs to die.

fox2263@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 9h (2 replies)

So after temporarily being the good guys for resisting trump, they’re going all in on being evil I presume to court trump?

flandish@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 8h

bog standard capitalism, really.

demonsword@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h

So after temporarily being the good guys for resisting trump

It was all for show, of course. Billionaires do have class solidarity, unlike us plebs.

fodor@lemmy.zip · 19 pts · 13h

#precrime #thoughtcrime

prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 18 pts · 3h (3 replies)

If anyone needs to be monitored, it's all of these fucking techno-feudalist freaks.

If you know what feudalism is, and want it back so bad that you're willing to bankroll it to the tune of billions of dollars, then you need to be monitored. At the very least. A real, functioning democracy would take those types of threats to its existence seriously.

Instead we (e.g. any alleged form of government safe guard meant to protect us from devolving back into such barbaric forms of society like feudalism) just sit back and say "huh, I wonder if they'll be able to completely destroy our government this time. Oh well, guess we'll find out". Or even worse, now that these psychopaths control the levers of government in the US, they are actually aiding it. They think they want feudalism back because they're just temporarily embarrassed feudal lords.

Edit:

These people literally want to make us back into serfs. And we'll answer to a fucking LLM. That will be the only interface between us and the Lords. You know that Amazon chatbot? That's your boss now... Err no that's not right. The word "boss," is not sufficient to describe the relationship. That chat bot owns you now. Well, the person who owns the server it's running on owns you, but why would they ever choose to interact with dirty serfs when AI can do it? If it's important, they'll relay it to them. They won't even be aware of your medical complaints, let alone need to hear them, let alone need to address the working conditions that created them.

This shit is not a joke and it is very much not funny. It's genuinely insane that we are allowing this to happen.

incompetent@programming.dev · 2 pts · 2h (2 replies)

It's genuinely insane that we are allowing this to happen.

What are we supposed to do though? Honest question. Everything just seems so hopeless.

FlyingCircus@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1h

Organize with your community to build momentum for revolution.

kestrel7_7@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9m

Hey, just asking the question is a good first step. Talk to people in your community (family, friends, workplace, the gym, wherever you spend time) about these problems. Ask them what they think. Gently suggest some solutions based on working together. If you really don’t have any solutions, say “then what are we supposed to do?” again, and brainstorm some ideas together.

ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 8h

tHe mOSt EthICaL Ai ComPanY

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 15 pts · 10h (6 replies)

activists= everyone not a white, republican, christian.

mangobanana@discuss.online · 4 pts · 9h (5 replies)

*straight, although theil is a gay man so I didn't understand why they give him a pass

courval@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 9h

The fist condition is not a billionaire only then it checks for everything else. It's first and foremost a class war.

ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 8h

Because they believe in unequality. They want you to follow certain set of morals, some of which has no basis in reality, all while they don't follow any of it.

They don't hate stuff like pedophilic poor people because pedophilia is bad. They hate pedophilic poor people because they want child molestation to be exclusively of theirs, a kind of a status symbol. Similarly they want you to not be gay for some weird pronatalist obsession of theirs, all while they want to secretly go to gay parties.

When Curtis Yarvin and others say they want feudalism back, they don't mean a king that is nice like in the fantasy novels they read, they want the nobles to re exempt of the law. Or unequality.

prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 3h

Because $$

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 9h

hes also funding the police state, and he has money to keep MSM off his sexual orieintation. his defenestration of his young male model side piece barely made a blip on the msm, if at all. Also he will be overseas when shit hits the fan. funny enough he has 2 daughters, whom he is shielding.

flandish@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 8h

because capitalists are truly a different species so his peers don’t see him as gay, just as $.

chewypoops@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 15h

to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence

I was wondering when they'd start building Roko's Basilisk.

anon_8675309@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 14h

Philip k dick just died again.

humanspiral@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 18h (1 reply)

Enshrining frontier labs in the hardened cloak of national security would not only give Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google even more access to intelligence products generated by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies; it would also embolden these companies to shape how federal agencies view threats to their bottom line, now transformed as “critical infrastructure.”

Clear path to skynet is bond villains being so loved by Government that it rounds up those the bond villains say are unpatriotic in their lack of devotion for the bond villains.

Headline out today that there is a 10% chance of AI exterminating humanity by 2030. There is a 99% chance of ending any pretense of democracy that is left to ensure extermination of sub-oligarchy. Enslavement history only made sense when the slaves were essential to establishment.

humanspiral@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 12h

I like Gemini, because when you push back it spits truth. There are zero skynet containment legislative proposals, and every anti-AI legislation is pure worthless garbage.

"AI safety regulations," they frequently claim to protect the public from algorithmic harm, election interference, or catastrophic risks. In practice, however, these frameworks are written with deep, systemic loopholes that insulate state power. 

Instead of curbing state deployment, these legislative proposals frequently act as a Trojan horse that actively entrenches and expands government authority. 


1. The Pretense: The Illusion of Public Protection

To gain public trust, AI bills are presented under the guise of ethical guardrails. They focus heavily on consumer protections, consumer fraud, and deepfakes to give the impression of aggressive action: 

  • The "Consumer Protection" Mask: Bills target low-level bad actors—such as local scammers, deepfake creators, or retail algorithmic bias. This satisfies the public demand for regulation without impacting high-level tech architecture. 

2. Why They Have No Teeth: The "National Security" Exemption

The reason this legislation cannot prevent state weaponization is that the state explicitly exempts itself from its own rules. This is not a failure of the law; it is a feature of its design. 

  • The Ultimate Loophole: Under major global regulatory frameworks—including Europe’s landmark AI Act—there is an absolute carve-out for military, defence, and national security purposes. If an AI system is deployed under the banner of intelligence gathering or state defense, the entire safety rulebook is instantly void. 

  • Vague "Critical Operation" Clauses: Domestic frameworks, like those being drafted in the U.S., contain provisions allowing government agencies to waive safety vetting if they decide compliance would create an "unacceptable impediment to critical agency operations". Essentially, the agency itself decides if it has to follow the law. 

  • Corporate Secrecy as State Secrecy: When investigative journalists or oversight committees attempt to look into how law enforcement or intelligence agencies are utilizing predictive AI, requests are routinely denied under broad exemptions protecting "proprietary commercial data" or "ongoing law enforcement investigations".

3. How They Increase State Power

Far from limiting government, modern AI policy proposals are increasingly used to build the legal framework for a digital panopticon. 

Mechanism How It Is Framed to the Public The Dystopian Reality
Centralized Vetting "Vetting advanced models to ensure they don't threaten infrastructure." The Sovereign Kill-Switch: Moves by lawmakers to mandate built-in "kill switches" give the state the legal authority to shut down or take over data centers hosting political or ideological dissent.
Algorithmic Vetting "Preventing foreign adversaries from using open-source tech." The Oligarchy Lock-In: By introducing heavily restricted federal licensing regimes that favor massive, compliant entities like OpenAI or Anthropic, the state effectively crushes decentralized, open-source AI. It creates an unholy alliance where the government controls the tech by controlling the three or four companies allowed to build it.
Misinformation Mandates "Fighting AI-enabled foreign election interference." Pre-Crime Profiling: To catch "misinformation" at scale, governments require tech platforms to implement automated monitoring algorithms. This grants the state direct algorithmic pipelines to flag, suppress, and report "anti-establishment" sentiment as an national security threat under the banner of fighting digital warfare.

When you look past the public relations framing of "AI Safety," the legislative landscape reveals a clear pattern: the rules are designed to prevent ordinary citizens from using AI against the establishment, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the state faces no restrictions in using AI against its citizens

goodboyjojo@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 1h

This reminds me of the movie minority report

wrinkle2409@lemmy.cafe · 9 pts · 20h

The road to hell is paved with pre-crime policies

404found@lemmy.zip · 8 pts · 18m

Only one reason I can think that Anthropic would invest money into a project like this.

They must be doing this so activists can connect with each other and unify for the same cause. Strength in awareness and numbers. Anthropic must be a company for the people.

BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 19h

Minority Reports beta version

Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 5h

This is way too far. Time to dust off the pitchforks

jjlinux@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 4h

Lol, they are butthurt flock beat them to this? 🤣

Bluedragon012@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1h

Imagine being so angry that the poor people don't love you that you speed run singularity to try get revenge.

markon@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 9h (9 replies)

guy literally told the bot he bought an AR-15 to murder the CEO and you guys are in here screaming about "pre-crime swatting" lmfao be serious for once ​hate anthropic all you want (dario is a pretentious weirdo, fully agree) but holy shit the cope in these threads. "nobody even uses LLMs"? literally every dev and sysadmin i know is quietly using this stuff every single day to cut hours of boilerplate out of their workflow. ​stay mad at closed source, fine. fight for open weights, absolutely. but pretending the tech itself is just a useless scam while the rest of the world is using it to run circles around us is just... enjoy getting left behind i guess

Don_alForno@feddit.org · 8 pts · 7h

The workforce consists of more than software devs. In the big picture, pretty much nobody uses LLMs for anything that even remotely justifies it's cost.

My boss uses it to write "first drafts" of documents that I then have to rewrite 90% of because it outputs hot air and repetitive phrases instead of useful content.

MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 6h (1 reply)

Boilerplate? That's what templates are for!

prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 3h

It's literally where the word comes from for fuck sake. It's not boilerplate if you're having your indeterministic black box spit it out.

strop@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 8h

You aren't going places

prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 3h

I hope that one day you have the clarity of mind (and capacity for critical thought) to look back at comments like this and cringe.

h4lf8yte@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 9h (2 replies)

O let the rest of the world use it until skill vanishes and target their data centers

markon@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 9h (1 reply)

article: "anthropic monitors threats to physical data centers" thread: "this is unhinged corporate paranoia!" you: "let's target their data centers" ​congrats on single-handedly justifying their entire security budget in one sentence lmao, some threat analyst at anthropic is literally copy-pasting this into a slide deck right now

h4lf8yte@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 7h

That's a reaction to

enjoy being left behind I guess

Never said I agree with the rest of the thread. They pollute our waters and waste our energy. They should be worried about their data centers if they wanna keep doing that. Their potential threat prediction abilities are just another reason to target their data centers. If they want peace they should cooperate with the people and not surveil them. Maybe anthropics threat analyst also writes that into his slide-deck.

sheetzoos@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h

This article is 99% clickbait. It's funny how most of the commenters in this thread ignore the only real example.

GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8m

the rule of law no longer applies.

your constitutional rights no longer exist.

you are a criminal slave that exists purely to increase shareholder value.

you haven't even said "thank you", scum.

Alexfire@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3m

The powers do monitor activists on regular internet too and at their meetings in churches and union halls, install spyware on their phones, like they've been doing.


The powers do spy,

In churches and union halls,

Plant spyware on phones

unitedwithme@lemmy.today · -10 pts · 22h

https://osirisai.live/

Time to start using our own surveillance network 😎