The AI-Powered Minority Report: Truth IS Stranger than Fiction

I came across a piece from The American Prospect published on September 9 and honestly, I found it to be like life imitating art!

Investigative reporter Daniel Boguslaw revealed that Anthropic, the AI company that positions itself as the responsible alternative in frontier AI development, is building an extensive predictive surveillance system to monitor activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Job postings, podcast interviews with Anthropic’s security officials, and comments to The Wall Street Journal paint a detailed picture of what this system looks like.

Anthropic tracks protests near its executives and physical assets in real time, using a third-party risk detection company called Samdesk. It has begun making routine reports to police departments across the country. It tracks what it calls “persons of interest” over time, looking for what it describes as “escalation patterns.” And it has explicitly adopted a pre-crime approach, attempting to predict incidents before they happen and, in some cases, reporting individuals to police before any crime has occurred.

A job posting for an enterprise intelligence specialist, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, lists the role’s responsibilities as identifying, assessing, tracking and investigating global threats including, and I want to be precise here: “geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends.”

This mirrors what we saw in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report. A world where the crime is predicted before it happens, where the person is reported before they have done anything wrong, where dissent is treated as a threat to be neutralised rather than a democratic right to be respected.

It should go without saying that if we applied even a fraction of the same resources,  intelligence capabilities, and engineering talent, toward developing technology that genuinely benefits humanity, technology could really and truly be the force for good that tech companies have been proclaiming for years. Think Wakanda. An Afrofuturist vision of technology directed entirely toward human flourishing, toward solving the problems that diminish people’s lives, toward building systems that serve the communities most affected by them.

Instead, we are taking the very worst of science fiction dystopia and are building it into reality.

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei wrote last month 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.” He framed this as a crisis of trust that AI companies need to solve.

Here is a concrete suggestion: stop surveilling the people who are asking you to slow down. What would it look like if the same resources being spent on activist surveillance were redirected toward technology that genuinely serves humanity?