Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Recorded: Sept. 9, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

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Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists - The American Prospect

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Home / Technology / Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

Posted inTechnology
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists

New hires and comments in interviews show that the AI giant is using its capabilities against dissenters.

by
Daniel Boguslaw
September 9, 2026September 8, 2026
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Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via AP

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.
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.
More from Daniel Boguslaw
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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This kind of pre-crime policing, encouraged without due process, is referenced as an explicit goal by Anthropic’s security program manager in the podcast reviewed by the Prospect. “The goal would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management,” he said, adding, “That’s the kind of operational maturity that makes sense for protecting high-value targets in any industry.”
Anthropic’s effort to build a predictive security apparatus extends beyond the C-suite to its Global Safety, Intelligence, and Security (GSIS) team, according to a job posting from last month detailing Anthropic’s search for an enterprise intelligence specialist who “will investigate specific threats, actors, and events, produce finished assessments, and help keep Anthropic’s employees ahead of a rapidly evolving threat landscape and in a defensible position.”
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).
The expansion of Anthropic’s intelligence-gathering to a national and even global scale tracks with recent efforts to heighten the labeling of AI and the infrastructure powering it, including data centers and power supply. A critical infrastructure designation would put artificial intelligence on the same footing as water, electricity, and broadband. And indeed, AI’s boosters like Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) have urged the Trump administration to make the change. Per ARI’s telling, AI is “so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

Anthropic (Re-)Enlists for War

Enshrining frontier labs in the hardened cloak of national security would not only give Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google even more access to intelligence products generated by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies; it would also embolden these companies to shape how federal agencies view threats to their bottom line, now transformed as “critical infrastructure.”
It’s not hard to imagine how civic engagement by the same bipartisan coalition opposing data centers could turn its focus onto AI, only to be branded in the same instant as extremists or, even worse, terrorists. Anthropic’s answer to this problem has been to work even harder at producing artificial intelligence that can deliver services that can’t be brushed aside by the public.
“I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on Twitter last month. “I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust … I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.”
As Anthropic ramps up its efforts to monitor dissent with in-house intelligence teams and real-time protest tracking powered by AI, it will have to contend with the increasing economic desperation that plagues human beings outside its Bay Area towers. Last week, the security guards who patrol the campuses of OpenAI and Anthropic announced that they had authorized a strike over stalled pay negotiations. In response, Anthropic sent a company-wide email telling employees that it was best if they worked from home.
“Who can survive with $22 an hour in San Francisco?” David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW, the union representing security guards in the Bay Area, said at a rally last week. Around him, security guards chanted: “Shame.”

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Tagged: Anthropic, artificial intelligence, Big Tech, corporate power, Dario Amodei, National Security, policing, protests, surveillance

Daniel Boguslaw

Daniel Boguslaw is an investigative reporter based in Brooklyn.
More by Daniel Boguslaw

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Anthropic is developing an extensive monitoring system designed to track dissenting activists, reflecting a strategic shift toward a predictive security apparatus that aims to manage threats proactively. This surveillance effort extends beyond monitoring protests near physical facilities and executives to implementing a "pre-crime" approach, which involves reporting suspects to law enforcement before criminal incidents occur. This operational philosophy is explicitly designed to transform organizational operations from reactive information processing into proactive, predictive, and preventative threat engagement and management, a goal highlighted by the firm's security program manager.

Information regarding this surveillance architecture was disclosed through interviews conducted with Anthropic personnel, including representatives from the Global Security Operations Center, which revealed methods for using threat detection services to anticipate disruptive events, such as adjusting travel routes based on advanced notice of planned protests. This process demonstrates how real-time intelligence facilitates operational mitigation, ensuring executive safety during high-stress situations. Furthermore, Anthropic engages in routine reporting to various police departments across the country and employs a person-of-interest process to track concerning behavior over time, suggesting that several individuals reported to the police were already under Anthropic's security observation. Instances of this approach have drawn scrutiny, such as when Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech but subsequently withheld actual messages from law enforcement, highlighting tensions between internal policy and external legal disclosure.

The scope of this intelligence gathering is institutional, extending throughout the organization via the Global Safety, Intelligence, and Security team. This team seeks to identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats, including geopolitical instability, terrorism, and activism, positioning the firm to conduct deep research and open-source intelligence collection on specific threats and actors. This expansion of intelligence gathering aligns with broader societal discussions regarding the critical infrastructure status of artificial intelligence, as proponents argue that AI systems necessitate the same level of designation as essential utilities like water or electricity to ensure national security and public safety.

Anthropic’s pursuit of enhanced security measures occurs alongside a broader context of public skepticism toward technology and institutions. CEO Dario Amodei has suggested that public distrust stems fundamentally from a crisis of trust among ordinary people regarding companies, governments, and the technology industry, rather than solely from warnings about artificial intelligence risks. This dynamic is further complicated by socioeconomic pressures, evidenced by labor disputes, such as strikes by security personnel over inadequate compensation, which underscore the disparity between high-level technological development and the economic realities facing the workforce. The firm's strategy to monitor dissent, therefore, intersects with its broader positioning as a responsible alternative to other AI developers while navigating national security demands.