GoKawiilOn Wednesday, investigative reporter Daniel Boguslaw detailed how security officials at Anthropic, the creator of Claude AI, are engaging in monitoring and surveillance, including reporting AI activists to police for potential future crimes.
The report, published in The American Prospect, comes amid the well-known Anthropic-Pentagon standoff, in which the AI company has feuded over how the military deploys mass-surveillance tools and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic lost several lucrative government contracts in the process. Last week, after US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Anthropic is “back on the right side,” a Pentagon official disputed the claim and said the company remains a “supply chain risk.”
Anthropic told CNET via email that it disagreed with Boguslaw’s piece, saying the headline and framing were inaccurate. “Anthropic is not — and has never said it is — ‘building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists.’ This is a physical-security function focused on keeping our employees safe, the same as any large company with a global workforce.”
Drawing from postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic, Boguslaw’s report lays out how the AI company is tracking activists who oppose the rapid development of AI near “physical Anthropic assets.” In July, the AI company also told The Wall Street Journal that it made routine reports to police departments about threats against employees, and monitored behavior in an effort to “catch escalation patterns early.”
It all ties together with a recent Anthropic job posting for an “enterprise intelligence specialist,” which describes the role as identifying, tracking and investigating “global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends.”
Anthropic did not dispute the wording of the job posting, but said the inclusion of “activism” in the list was just “one of many threat categories a security team monitors for employee-safety purposes.”
Anthropic appears to be casting a wide net to monitor alleged threats. Weiquan Lin/Getty Images
As the backlash over AI ramps up — especially around data centers and automated license plate readers like Flock — the trend of predictive policing also continues to grow. Dubbed “precrime” in sci-fi movies like Minority Report, this kind of crime forecasting has become increasingly integrated into police departments. Algorithmic software and AI tools analyze historical crime data, arrest records and individual “risk scores” to preemptively target criminal activity.
In Anthropic’s case, the company has access to vast amounts of data through its Claude AI chatbot and other intelligence-gathering tools, leading it to report individuals to the police while refusing to share proof of threats or wrongdoing, according to The San Francisco Standard. Also, as Reddit users quickly noticed, Anthropic updated its privacy policy this summer to make it easier to share conversation data with police on its own determination, rather than waiting for a court order.
These reports allege that Anthropic could be bypassing standard legal protocols, not only by reporting “precrimes” without due process but also by withholding evidence from law enforcement.
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