GoKawiilJob 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.
Anthropic’s plans to surveil dissent are at odds with the firm’s efforts to cast itself as the responsible alternative to OpenAI. At the beginning of the year, the Department of Defense and Anthropic engaged in a high-profile dustup over Anthropic’s refusal to allow the military to use its tools for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. That tension seems to have eased as Anthropic hires for “national security sales” positions, seeking to restart military contracts. The increase in threat monitoring of domestic opponents fits with a renewed focus on national security.
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A piece of Anthropic’s surveillance architecture was revealed in a podcast interview from last year between Anthropic Global Security Operations Center Manager Keon Ellison, Security Operations Manager Zach Melvin, and James Neufeld, CEO of Samdesk, a company Anthropic contracts with for risk detection.
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.”
Ellison said that Anthropic used this data to devise an alternate route for the executive and funnel them to a service entrance at the hotel. “What could have been a high-stress situation,” he said, “was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information.”
Anthropic has begun making routine reports to police departments across the country for threats, and told The Wall Street Journal in July, “We track concerning behavior over time through a person-of-interest process, allowing us to catch escalation patterns early.” According to the Journal, “several individuals involved in incidents reported to police were already being tracked by Anthropic security.”
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.
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