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.
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:
- Get a list of anti-AI advocates
- Swat them
- Refuse to show evidence of claims
Not rapists, child molesters, kidnappers, murderers, human traffickers, spies, or terrorists!? They are going after activists… Yeah they are fucking evil and know it.
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.
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.
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.
“What are we supposed to DO???” ask the people who have tried literally nothing.
