If I strip out the editorializing, I think the conclusions are:

1. Someone told Claude they had an AR-15 and the CEO of Anthropic was "in their sights". Anthropic reported this to the police.

2. Anthropic contracts with a security agency.

3. Anthropic is looking to build in-house capability for security.

Anthropic clearly has high-value targets (see, e.g. the person with the AR-15 from point 1). When I worked at Microsoft in the 2000s, they also had in-house security to investigate threats against facilities and executives.

I would believe Anthropic is doing evil things, but I don't think this article actually makes that claim, despite the bombast about "pre-crime".

AI is an authoritarian's dream. The future is bright! Dear leader Dario will lead us there!

“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.”

Says the guy creating a pre-crime global surveillance apparatus. Wonder why people don't trust him!

“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.”

[..] “What could have been a high-stress situation,”

Democratic protest is now a high-stress situation?

The headline anecdote is about them re-routing executives around a protest based on information from a publicly filed permit.

The other anecdote is about them reporting a user who made a death threat.

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.”

They're so close to being self aware..

They’re building Samaritan.

“several individuals involved in incidents reported to police were already being tracked by Anthropic security.”

Comsider the tracking potential.

Now consider that they can perform textual analysis at a scale large enough to figure out who you are based on your linguistic fingerprints across HN, Meta, Github, forms you've filled out for you child's school, your doctor, or wherever else a service provider has used them.

These are "AI" companies but monitoring is what the AI is and will be used for.

What today is used for good, tomorrow can be used for evil.

“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.”

Shielding the executives from the voices of the people. There's a recurring pattern that people with power physically distance themselves from common people, journalists and victims of their actions. They do not want to get personally confronted, every interaction "with the public" needs to be 100% controlled by them. Critics can ask them anything, sure, but only on their terms. This is how they protect themselves from responsibility.

It turns out that Anthropic (and OpenAI) are no different to Palantir or are just Palantir-lite and both have government contracts, their AI tech was used in wars and now they are used for surveillance.

Absolutely predictable. [0]

[0] https://smackernews.com/item/46407683 HN

Because if it’s just more words being tossed on HN, then the answer is: nothing.