Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic show that the frontier AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

In addition to monitoring activists in the vicinity of Anthropic executives and keeping tabs on protests near physical Anthropic assets, the firm is also implementing a “pre-crime” approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen. In some cases, that also means reporting suspects to police before a crime occurs. Anthropic did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.

Apparently they can also sick the police on you on a trust-me-bro basis:

Last month, The San Francisco Standard reported that Anthropic had reported a man to San Francisco police for telling Claude that he had bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had CEO Dario Amodei “in his sights.” When the Standard contacted the man in question, he told the newspaper he was “just fucking around.”

But 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.

image shamelessly stolen from https://bsky.app/profile/timhenke.bsky.social/post/3mv5puo47ns2z

I’m kind of surprised that this made the news in Greece, unlike the other 128 times something very similar happened. I wonder if anthropic marketing is pushing the story harder than usual, or if it’s the opposite and they’re asleep on the wheel or simply don’t think there’s anything to gain from trying to contain such stories anymore.

Running a game for any reasonable amount of time this way will bankrupt you may times over from token overspend. This is just to make investors horny, it’s not getting released in any meaningful way.

wtf is deal of that segyges person

He does worthless little-birthday-boy AI boosting while pretending to be the serious face of bluesky AI bootlicking fair and balanced anti-anti-AI bluesky.

Occasionally has decent sneer content, though it has a much more evident muh datacenters tint these days. Writer of the siskind email explainer.

This feels like a problem readily solvable by not playing shitty games.

They didn’t deny it, they said if the other workers’ research ended up in the training data it wasn’t deliberate. Then they gave the researcher who noticed the similarities a “co-publish with us or else” offer.

Some alignment guy bailed out of fear anthropic will unfavorably immanentize the eschaton. It’s as cliche and pointless as the op makes it sound.

Still the link OP shared is like 80% about Terrence Tao worrying about LLMs ruining mathematics, it’s a kind of reverse bury the lead situation, which is a bit unnecessary.

LLMs can be scalpels

As in better suited for performing very fine tasks? It’s literally the opposite, being everything machines is their main feature, either in terms of churning out endless text at the vaguest provocation or by being a natural language intermediary between the user and the actual scalpel-like tools, that it then wields like a sledge hammer by forcing endless iterations until something sticks.

Wielded in the right hands, they can appear to work magic

Wielded in the right situation more like, which varies between models and can’t be a priori known.

lol pilgramage what. is he converting?

The parts I skimmed mostly read like a travelogue so tax write-off vacations with the family in Europe, plus he has an audience of marks that will eat up fucking anything as long as it’s framed as independent research into the parts mainstream academia doesn’t want YOU to know about.

Still the cross-section between simulationists/transhumanists and mysticism enthusiasts was already huge before Yud mixed in adult Harry Potter fandom and an implicitly supernatural set of adages about human-to-computer soul transfer and living in the end of days waiting for the Artificial Godhead Intelligence to incarnate and judge humanity.

The progression from ‘the alleged novel parts were actually already in the training data’ to ‘we just stole them from some guy’s chatbot logs’ has been nothing if not organic.

an insane amount of compute had been used.

You don’t say.

structured language for interacting with LLM

that’s_not_how_any_of_this_works.webm

Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine.

That’s it. That’s the post.

i guess that’s why Cory Doctorow likes them so much.

edit: they are apparently professionally affiliated

What a POS

For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.

I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s Always Posting.

No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.

I don’t know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.

If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky¹ (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.

1. They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI “centrist” in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.

The post title vs your write-up had me going, I initially thought RFK was actually recommending better mental health support to counteract bad parenting habits instead of the usual run-of-the-mill moralising about screen time.

One of my big hot takes is that being a new parent with a full time job and no assistance from an extended family can cause behavioural changes on par with neurological impairment and bad habits which can carry on even as the kids grow up and things get slightly more normal, so it’s nice to see a version of that in published paper form.