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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Anthropic released a long blog post on various examples of people caught misusing their AI. A few thoughts:

  1. One major sort of concern that people have about AI is misuse by rogue actors. It's interesting here that they managed to catch a large variety of people doing that. While we only see who they caught, and not who they didn't catch, the ability to do detection at this scale does make me wonder whether in the long run, AI will more have the effect of democratizing the ability to do harm (as I was previously leaning more towards), or whether the ability of sophisticated actors to detect and smother that will be more important.

  2. This gives a bit more of a feel to me of what it is like to run a surveillance state. I'm sure we will have an increase in AI-powered surveillance in the future.

  3. At the same time, surveillance was one of the categories of things that they were listing here, seeing as Anthropic is not permitted to be used for surveillance. I am curious how the ecosystem of surveillance contractors will develop.

  4. Finding all of this was only happened because people want to use Anthropic, because their AI is capable. When there are viable alternatives who are more permissive, people engaging in prohibited activity try to shift to use those when possible, at least, in cases where they cannot do what they want with Claude. This is pertinent for discussions about open source vs. proprietary models, as well as differences in precautions between different companies.

In on-premises environments, the actor used AI to monitor the stealth and persistence of their implants. When their implants were flagged by security products, the actor used Claude to systematically identify, modify and redeploy the detected artifacts.

I think this will read like an admission of guilt/wrongdoing to the US govt. Being radically honest and open doesn't read so well to politicians and decisionmakers.

GTG-16002: Moonshot serves Claude instead of Kimi and collects exchanges for model training

I remember thinking that some of the new Kimis sounded very Claudey. Earlier Kimis sounded genuinely distinctive but then they Clauded up.

In using Kimi, the user revealed internal code and live credentials from multiple major PRC companies, including high-profile technology companies.

Yeah, AGI let alone ASI is gonna cut through any human organization like a knife through butter. People cannot be trusted, they are lazy and make mistakes. They plug their laptops into some agent that does god knows what (it's more convenient and we 'just trust' the machine).

Alternately maybe they're lying since Kimi is the biggest Chinese threat to Anthropic and they want to pull the eye of Sauron (Party security-state) down on them as a suppression tactic? And admitting how their models were used for all this bad stuff is a galaxy-brained ploy to get more regulation, guard the lie with a bodyguard of truth? Who can say.