--- title: "Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities" description: "The AI lab is reportedly building out a dragnet not just to surveil protestors, but to predict \"threat engagement\" before it happens." date: "2026-09-10" modified: "2026-09-10" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins.md" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-surveillance-predictive-system-spy-ai-activists" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Ethics" - "Future Society" - "Privacy" --- # Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities ![A group of protesters holding signs with messages opposing AI, including "SAY NO TO AI," "PAUSE AI," and "DON'T LET AI DECIDE YOUR FUTURE." Some signs feature a red pause symbol. The crowd includes people wearing sunglasses and holding cameras, indicating media coverage. The setting appears to be outdoors in an urban area.]() With opposition to AI [continuing to grow](), a top AI lab is building out a massive surveillance apparatus meant to keep a close eye on dissenters and predict when the next groundswell of protest might occur. News of Anthropic's system was first reported [by the *American Prospect*](), which spoke with Anthropic senior security officials and indexed job postings to get an understanding of the dragnet. On top of keeping tabs on protests in the vicinity of Anthropic offices, the publication notes that the AI lab is taking a "pre-crime" approach to watching for [potential civil unrest](). To give an example, the *Prospect* points out an incident shared by Anthropic security operations managers Keon Ellison and Zach Melvin, alongside James Neufeld, CEO of risk detection company Samdesk. "Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest," Ellison said candidly. After the scheduled protest was moved up an hour due to a mix-up with police permits, the security chief said that "Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline." "That extra hour was critical," Ellison continued. "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 was really mitigated through early detection through Samdesk and giving us that information." Outside of anticipating protests, there were also cases where Anthropic reported conversations held with its AI chatbot Claude to police. Though there have been calls to increase safety guardrails on large language models, Anthropic's approach sounds bizarre. As [the *San Francisco Standard* reported]() in August, Anthropic reported a San Francisco man to the cops after he told Claude he was holding a rifle, and had the company's CEO Dario Amodei "in his sights." Yet when Anthropic reported the conversation to Bay Area police, the company refused to provide the man's chat logs — as the *Prospect* observes, essentially reporting the man without sharing any tangible evidence of misconduct. "The goal," as Anthropic's security manager said in the interview, "would be transforming operations from reactive information to gathering proactive and predictive and preventative threat engagement and management. That's the kind of operational maturity that makes sense for protecting high-value targets in any industry." **More on AI:** *[Protesters Arrested After Storming OpenAI Lobbying Office]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()