Anthropic's warning shot about surveillance demands attention

AI enables the state to surveil citizens at a massive scale. This raises serious questions of privacy, freedom and dissidence

- SANJOY CHAKRAVORTY is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.

Late last month, the US Department of War labelled Anthropic, creator of the artificial intelligence (AI) system Claude, “a supply chain risk,” and began taking steps to remove it from all use in the department, including by contractors and subcontractors to its roughly $1 trillion annual spending. There are news reports that no company that does work with the Pentagon will be allowed to engage in “commercial activity” with Anthropic. President Donald Trump called Anthropic a “radical left, woke company” that he “fired... like dogs.”

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and leading system in the AI race, swooped in within a day. It is Anthropic’s main rival and both companies are far ahead of challengers like Alphabet, Deep Seek, Meta and Microsoft. Anthropic is estimated to lose about $200 million in direct contracts. Its preference for the public good over private gain is widely viewed as a heroic, almost quixotic, act.

Why did matters come to this head? In a public statement, Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said it is because Anthropic demanded two safeguards in using its product. One, that it should not be used for mass surveillance against Americans. Two, it should not be deployed for fully autonomous weapons. Amodei’s own words are worth quoting at length because they summarize the argument best.

First: “AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties... Under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant... Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.” Today’s column focuses on this issue.