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Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
- rvz 19d agoImagine 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. Absolutely predictable. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683
- culi 19d agoPalantir'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
- bigyabai 19d ago> Imagine defending a corporation ftfy
- verdverm 19d agoThis 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?
- varispeed 19d agoWhen next government become worse than the previous one, such technologies become handy for new emperor to keep power and crush dissent. What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.
- nemomarx 19d agoit won't be used for good today though.
- Analemma_ 19d agoMan, 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!
- ben_w 19d ago> The current government is maximally evil and interested in using technology to keep power and crush dissent. You don't need to introduce hypotheticals! No no, I assure you, it's quite capable of getting very much worse.
- NewJazz 19d agoYeah this administration may have some of the worst intent imaginable, but at least they're bad at hiding it and hitting opposition at every corner... Absolutely more room for evil in this world.
- iwontberude 19d ago[dead]
- ahsillyme 19d agoI think the way to understand the objection here is that it's rhetorical flair (grandparent's dictum) that feels like it's intent is to assuage -- because it's a conditional that is implicitly loaded with an assumption about the current state of affairs ("not today") --, but that reasonably speaking, already things are bad enough to make such a conditional disingenuous. "Maximally evil" is just stressing it, though not technically true, because obviously things can always get worse. Personally, (and the reason I reply here since it hasn't been raised elsewhere in the thread), I have always objected to said conditional but on grounds of the principle that it leaves an opening to argue against what should be an absolute right (the standard for excellent conduct should not be "don't worry, we're not the worst so it's alright when we do it").
- 0c3ca83 19d ago> The current government is maximally evil Wow. That's incredibly optimistic. Imagine, for example, the next 'no kings' protest is met with machine gun fire, rather than ice sporadically killing activists. And then start adding on stuff. Today, the people at the top need people at the bottom to sustain their lifestyle. Put on your billionare sociopath hat for a moment and ask yourself: If AI ever becomes sufficient to run an economy, why should you care about whether they live or die? Then, ask yourself why the wealthy are so obsessed with AI.
- georgemcbay 19d ago> 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.
- glenda 19d agoIt 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.
- Brian_K_White 19d agoIt'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.
- vrganj 19d agoI 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".
- palmotea 19d agoRemember 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!
- corv 19d agoFuture so bright I need to wear sunglasses — at night
- 0c3ca83 19d agoFuture is bright because it's going up in flames.
- berytos_storm 18d ago[dead]
- cindyllm 18d ago[dead]
- ElProlactin 19d agoYou won't need to wear sunglasses because apparently there's a >10% chance there is no future.
- palmotea 19d ago> You won't need to wear sunglasses because apparently there's a >10% chance there is no future. That's a reasonable risk to take if there's a possibility of Dario Amodei becoming a trillionaire with his very own Stasi. I think AI could be very useful to implement Zersetzung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung), and I am excited about the future technological advances in that area. It'll be a really interesting white paper!
- 12936 19d agoIs Amodei's wife deep state? First the Epstein contacts, then gf of Eric Schmidt and then marrying Amodei.
- Aboutplants 19d agolol, I didn’t know about this. Certainly isn’t a very good look
- satellites 19d agoAn 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.
- laimewhisps 19d agoI don't believe I've ever heard Amodei "openly talk" about his wife being an Epstein person. I think the CIA/Mossad/who knows what else connections that a lot of these companies have is generally swept under the rug.
- zmgsabst 19d agoIcebergs 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.
- satellites 19d agoGood 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.
- valvix 19d agoIt's fine as long as it's the activists I personally find cringe and annoying
- hyperbolablabla 19d agoCan't wait for the UK government to start convicting dissidents for precrime
- smalltorch 19d agoIt's not clear from the article if this is a mass intake of all internet usage or simply within their own platforms.
- slowin 19d agoThis 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.”
- culi 19d agoI 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.”
- vaylian 19d ago> “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?
- SpicyLemonZest 19d agoIt 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.
- ryandrake 19d agoCorporate 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.
- kccqzy 19d agoOf 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.
- woah 19d agoSorry to spoil the party in here, but is this different than the security that any large corporation has? 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.
- culi 19d agoI 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
- cldellow 19d agoThe 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".
- xinayder 19d agoDon'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.
- woah 19d agoHow would you amend the policy?
- slowin 19d agoThat'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.
- brightball 19d ago
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- setnone 19d agothey must call them precriminals
- slowin 19d ago> “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!
- pesus 19d agoIt'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?
- slowin 19d agoI don't think they're oblivious, I think they're lying. Playing dumb/plausible deniability can give them enough wiggle room to execute plans that would otherwise be stopped before it's too late.
- overtone1000 19d agoI thought his repeated use of the phrase "ordinary people" instead of something like "laypersons" was a little telling about how he views himself and the members of his industry. The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary. https://xcancel.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762#m https://xcancel.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762#m
- ryandrake 19d agoThe entire class of people see themselves as better and more deserving than you. They used to at least try to be subtle about it, but there's no real social downside of just going mask-off so they don't even hide it anymore.
- mbmbn 19d ago[dead]
- logans_gun 19d agoMy question in all of these cases is always the same: what are you going to do about it? Because if it’s just more words being tossed on HN, then the answer is: nothing.
- dgellow 19d agoPlease no fed posting on HN https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fedpost
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- sdcfgy 19d agoI preferred the technology industry when it had less fascist dystopias in it.
- throwup238 19d ago> “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.” They’re building Samaritan.
- bilekas 19d ago> 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.” They're so close to being self aware..
- emsign 19d ago> “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.
- quantified 19d ago> “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.
- Charly_HW 19d agoPower corrupts. The more power something holds, the harder it is to resist corruption.
- demo4567 19d agoand 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.
- penguin_booze 19d agoIs 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.
- jocelyner 19d ago[dead]
- sleight42 19d agoSeriously? No one said "the first step in Roko's Basilisk"???
- de6u99er 18d agoThis is what usually happens when you put people in charge who can't be trusted to bear the weight of the power entrusted into them. I wish there was a mandatory sociopath test every C-hole is obliged to take.