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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15749 thread views

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.

Now this is what begging for regulatory capture looks like. Two things stick out in that regard.

  1. The heavy emphasis on US geopolitical adversaries.

  2. The contrast between Anthropic-provided AI services (good) and AI services provided by other companies (bad).

Incredible, borderline unforgivable, that they didn't turn the Iranian accounts over to U.S. intelligence so they could be run as assets. AI future led by neurodivergents is genuinely concerning.

What makes you think they didn't?

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