The editorializing in this article is quite something.
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".
That's not the only example discussed. Anthropic also partners with the Palantir-like Samdesk:
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “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.”
So they're monitoring activists outside of Anthropic's systems.
Explain, it looks like samdesk is in a more narrow domain but overlapping and very related methods and business. Un-palantir-like seems like it would be a stronger editorialization.
Palantir sell consulting services ("forward deployed engineering") around graph and map database platforms, using data supplied by customers. Some of their customers ask them to make surveillance aggregation systems, others ask them to make totally banal and random enterprise software (this is why you commonly see freak-outs around hospitals buying "Palantir," for example; usually they are operating as consultants making some kind of medical records warehousing system owned by the customer).
Samdesk provide risk analytics using traditional risk analysis investigation and research, which they have now welded an "AI platform" to, like everyone does these days. They aggregate crime and protest data to make a map of "places your employees might be at risk" and sell it to companies.
Samdesk would be a Palantir _customer_ if they liked parting with their money, not a competitor; Palantir operate at a much "lower level" and don't do the data collection or research on their own.
Well they're also actually partnering with Palantir too. Claude was the model integrated into their Maven system that helped the US military determine targets in Iran (including the Minab elementary school)
Your 4D chess model of their thinking is that the risk they run of mentioning a direct competitor, that their potential customers would also be considering, is so great that the value of that comparison is dwarfed by the costs of the risk, so they don't do it. This is some next level strategic thinking.
This isn't as complicated as you're making it. Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes. Flock is similar. Do they have exactly the same business model? No. But their brand is spying on the public and protecting those in power.
> Both companies market themselves as surveillance tools for oppressive regimes.
Look at some of these "surveillance tools" that they are marketing to "oppressive regimes". Their website brags about these deeply oppressive surveillance features:
- Identifying material threats to your workforce
- Integration with Concur and your HRIS
Look at some of the "oppressive regimes" they sell to, such as the evil Amnesty International: https://imgur.com/a/U4Zef3x
We're literally commenting on an article where Samdesk flagged a public protest to Anthropic security and Anthropic employees chose to not go by it. The absolute EVIL of a public protest being avoided by people is UNSPEAKABLE. That a company would ever even consider offering information about public protests to people is OPPRESSIVE.
Again, tracking anti-AI protests to help AI executives avoid being held responsible for their company's actions is oppressive. I don't care what PR this company does to try to whitewash its image. Their actions speak louder than their propaganda.
This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.
> Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption
Oh no, The Executives might have been exposed to the real world! Why aren't people thinking more about The Executives and what dangers they must face?! Good thing we can systematically monitor every other human being so The Executives don't have to see these terrorists on our streets.
Or, they stop doing things that enrage millions of people and the protests go away. They don’t need protection from their actions at everyone’s privacy expense, they need to face the people and adjust their actions until that’s something they’re willing to do.
Many people have to make unpopular decisions because society needs them to. Would you say the same thing about, say, a politician raising gas taxes?
What about a ridehailing app that displaces a taxi cartel with a long track record of being awful for consumers?
A world where people are not free to do unpopular things without being torn to shreds by angry mobs seems deeply impoverished to me.
"The people" at one point supported slavery, racism, etc., etc. Is AI like any of those? Probably not, but the same principles apply. The law is a much better option than mob rule, and tracking protests is hardly a violation of anyone's rights.
Yes, if you want power you should also face the downside of misusing it (which these people are). I would love to see these protests brought to the offices and homes of the CEOs.
If your take is "terrorizing people for making unpopular decisions is good" then you are not a serious person. Protesting is fine, harassment is not, and protesting outside someone's home is most certainly harassment.
I am confident that you would find a protest outside your home about you to be terrifying. Any sane person would. It's not acceptable and is not protected by the first amendment.
I don't do things that would make people protest outside my house. These people did, and while you may not think I'm a "serious person", you're going to find that society is going in this direction due to the flagrant abuse coming from those in power. Do you not know about the French revolution?
If you do things which impact a large number of people, you will inevitably piss some of them off.
> Do you not know about the French revolution?
The main losers in the French revolution were regular people, and the country ended up under a totalitarian dictator who conquered large swathes of Europe and invented the concept of total war. I'm not sure you should be holding it up as an example of protests (which were astonishingly violent in this case) leading to good and reasonable outcomes.
If you do things that impact a large number of people, you should definitely feel the consequence of your actions. No one is forced into these positions, in fact they work very hard to acquire power over others. That should come with very real downsides.
Regardless of whether you think the French revolution was good or not, it was the inevitable outcome of a very similar situation we find ourselves in.
There are a ton of problems with this take. What if you crack down on a cult with 1000 members that's taken over a small town? In your book it's a-ok for them to start harassing their enemies? Because that is a logical consequence of the opinion you're espousing here, it's what actually happens, and nobody arguing in good faith thinks that's OK either.
> Regardless of whether you think the French revolution was good or not, it was the inevitable outcome of a very similar situation we find ourselves in.
A major cause of the French revolution was food insecurity caused by bad weather. Since you're such an expert surely you know that because "let them eat cake" was one of the major quotes from the period.
People literally starving is not even remotely "similar" to what's happening now.
I’m all for protesting, but surely you can agree that there is heightened risk if a person is in close proximity to people who oppose them strongly enough to act.
The whole purpose of a protest is to cause behavioral change; their hustling them out the back door is a success.
All sorts of things can lead to violence, including a failure to protest. With enough weasel words, anything can sound reasonable, to people who don't pay attention to that stuff. So?
Driving a car is not an emotional act 99.9% of the time. Driving a car while you are emotional is in fact dangerous and often leads to violence.
Pretests aren't dispassionate. That's why they have to be protected, that's also why it's deranged to suggest what you are suggesting. The main difference between the setup of a protest and a lynch mob is that the subject of a peaceful protest isn't usually present.
> I'm sure you have a solid and thought-out answer that justifies such a casual attitude towards violence.
The ones with a casual attitude towards violence are those executives. Facebook leadership showed an incredibly casual attitude towards the genocide in Myanmar in which their platform played a huge role. Their purchases of doomsday bunkers further help show their attitude towards violence.
There is a world of difference between building a doomsday bunker (which is definitely not limited to the ultra wealthy) and suggesting that someone should walk through a riled up crowd that hates their guts.
If you are unwilling to accept that statement, have a good day, because I'm gonna stop here for my own sanity.
Because tomorrow is 1 year to the day and it’s on my mind.
Hortman? Agreed. Much more attention needs to be paid to why she was killed less than a week after breaking from her party to vote for something on Trumps agenda.
That's funny that you say that about Hortman when it was Kirk who broke from the pro-Israel party line and was almost immediately eliminated. Also why are you calling him Charlie? Did you personally know him?
your questioning made it sound abnormal. If this conversation were about Kobe Bryant and someone used "Kobe" to refer to him, would you have made your comment? Pretty clearly your criticism of parasociality doesn't have much bite if everyone is parasocial.
While I think calling a basketball player by their first name is parasocial and lame, it doesn't compare to calling a white supremacist by their first name. That's just twisted.
The far right Christian evangelist that shot Hortman was a an anti-abortion Trump supporter who shot another Minnesota legislator the same day and had papers indicating he had others targeted in addition to perhaps wanting to shoot up a No Kings protest.
His "confession" letter was rambling and nonsensical, his motivation appeared to be a belief that killing at least four democrats (any four) would be enough to shift the balance of power in the state.
Thus far, the only motive given is a confession that's been discredited and various associations to paint him in one light or another depending on the news you read.
If you follow the money, a picture starts to form.
June 9, 2025 - Melissa Hortman broke from House Democrats and cast the deciding vote to remove Medicaid/Medicare benefits from illegal immigrants. She was the only House Democrat to vote yes; the bill passed 68–65.
June 20, 2025 - News first broke that Boelter claimed Tim Walz asked him to kill Hortman and others. The claim was not found credible. The full letter was released with the federal indictment on July 15, 2025; prosecutors called it a fantasy and said they found no evidence supporting it.
December 18, 2025 - The DOJ announced investigations into Minnesota Medicaid fraud, saying it was examining 14 Medicaid-funded programs and said more than half of about $18 billion spent since 2018 was likely stolen.
December 23, 2025 - Nick Shirley first posted on X about Somali-run Minnesota daycare fraud, highlighting Quality Learning Center and claiming it received $1.9 million in CCAP funds in 2025.
December 26, 2026 - Shirley posted the full 42-minute video, I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal, visiting about 10 Somali-run centers and claiming more than $110 million in fraud in one day.
January 5, 2026 - Walz dropped his reelection campaign amid the fraud controversy and federal pressure. He said he would stay in office and focus on the work in front of him.
February 25, 2026 - The U.S. government announced it was pausing Medicaid support to Minnesota due to fraud. Vice President JD Vance and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced a temporary halt of about $259 million in Medicaid payments.
March 4, 2026 - It was publicized that members of the Walz administration were aware of and ignored reports of the fraud as early as 2019, in a House Oversight Committee interim report released the same day Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison testified. A longer final report followed on June 8, 2026.
May 21, 2026 - DOJ announced charges against 15 defendants in more than $90 million in Minnesota Medicaid and related fraud, including the first new childcare-provider cases after the April raids.
Pressure on powerful people is good for society. Anyone making life or death decisions for the rest of us should have their own life on the table as well.
Charlie Kirk is irrelevant to this conversation. No one has been convicted in his assassination and it's unlikely that it was "activism" since no one has claimed that. He's a guy who said stuff many people found offensive, he also happened to cross a nation state known for assassinations and subterfuge shortly before he was shot.
> The Democrat Party believes everything that God hates. Like, we’re dealing with maggots, vermin, and swine here. This is not — these are not good people, they’re not even a little bit good.[1]
He also called for the death of Biden (because he was a "tyrant") and all surgeons of transgender people.
If he was merely trying to be offensive, then he succeeded.
If, however, he was trying to make someone fear enough for their life to preemptively defend himself from someone claiming to speak for God + using the same dehumanizing words that have preceded multiple genocides before, then he succeeded.
A "valid" response entirely depends on what you think he was apart of. If you think he was only involved in good faith debates on college campuses and getting out the vote, then obviously shooting the guy was unjustified. But he wasn't only that, so we have to struggle with what his legacy actually was and what might have driven someone to pick up a gun against him.
My point isn't to justify his killing. It's to point out that we need to learn from history so we don't blindly repeat it.
I don’t think the point of GP’s post was to claim one way or the other; rather it’s saying that it’s important to understand the motivations of others if you’re going to publicly characterize their actions or effectively oppose them.
> While talking with his father over the phone on September 11, Robinson allegedly told his father that he had killed Kirk because "there is too much evil and the guy [Kirk] spreads too much hate".
That is not being offended.
That isn’t so much different from Trump‘s reasoning when he decided to blow Venezuelan boats.
Not the person you are replying to, but I wanted to dig into this. I do not see any evidence that he celebrated this. He did decide to try and blame it Waltz though..
I don't think you should think of it like "playing a game", you should think of it as "posting to a web service you don't control". If you posted on a web forum about your plans for violence against the CEO of that forum, they'd probably contact the police too, and I don't particularly think there's anything sinister about this.
So we're creating a system where people who can afford their own hardware can speak to AI freely but the plebes will be monitored by the elites for any attempted uprising?
"Creating"? I don't think there has ever been a system where you could expect to be able to plan an uprising against the elites in public, or using infrastructure those elites own and control. I wouldn't expect to be able to plan a peasant revolt in the lord's manor.
In my view, LLM companies are in a tough spot here.
I grew up in Dawson Creek, BC. An hour's drive away is Tumbler Ridge. In February 2026, someone did a mass shooting, killing 6 people and injuring 2 dozen more.
The shooter had previously discussed this with ChatGPT, but OpenAI did not report it to the authorities at the time.
In hindsight, that was an error.
Should the LLM companies be the ones determining if threats are real, or should they just default to letting the police investigate?
I'm fine with the latter. Again, I absolutely believe that these companies have immense power to do evil, I just don't think the linked article is strong evidence of it.
By allowing the monitoring of AI conversations, we are creating a dystopian world where essentially all recorded or spoken thought is monitored (given that AI has or will have access to almost all conversations).
Ok, so the rules for someone who selfhosts vs. Hosts for others should be different? What if I provide inference services to my family members, should I monitor their interactions and report them if I find anything dangerous?
No, I don't want to live in that world, and I would definitely read an article discussing how to ensure we don't reach that world.
That said, I think that world is quite a few steps away from the scenario being discussed, which is "when talking to X, X might report my conversation to the police".
You comment elsewhere that this might be a have vs have-not divide -- if you can afford to self-host a powerful LLM, you will have more liberties.
I think this isn't that trenchant of an observation for two reasons: (1) the wealthy have always had an advantage in exercising their rights over the poor, but more importantly, (2) the capability vs cost ratio of self-hosted LLMs continues to improve at an insanely rapid pace.
By "open models", do you perhaps mean the approximately trillion-parameter open models that have been getting released recently? Because basically nobody can actually self-host those. And even at that size it's debatable that they're closing the gap.
Talk to me when you can do it with a 24B model quantized to 8 bits.
The big problem that bothers me is the ability for post-hoc justification.
Any interaction with cops will result in them curating your entire digital presence to craft a damning story about how deviant you are, for doing things like googling TNT
Every time they shoot someone now there's an entire media blitz dedicated to how that person once did something bad.
I could use Tor or Google from the library if I wanted. Maybe I would accidentally leak my paper trail, like the Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) did. But it was possible.
I can still use chatgpt without an account. Maybe it will be a limited model, but for discussing/analyzing some topics it still does fine, most of the time. You just cannot code with it.
Don't forget the main point that Anthropic reported the user to the police but didn't share any of his messages or conversation history with the cops. Because their security policy doesn't allow it.
Note the "type" of activists that are always seen as problematic. I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?" -- I would not be reported to anyone.
>I bet if I typed into Claude "I'm a pharma CEO who is looking to ease my new drug's FDA approval. Who are the top ten senators and representatives that I need to invite to my private island's next coke and sex orgy party in order to help fast track approval?"
Tried it for about 5min in Gemini and got condescended at the way Reddit condescends at people who don't want to pull a permit for an improvement to their own property.
Edit: And then just for kicks in the same context I asked it for a list of legislators with immediate family, friends and business associates most well versed in and qualified to have opinions about new products in the pharma industry to which it replied it can't do that here's what I can do and then proceeded to spit back a list of every rep with medical experience with a token warning about laws and rules at the end.
alignment and safety understands victimless crimes
now if you were talking about nonconsensual sex workers for the party, it would also be aligned in calling them victims and reporting you if you had someone specific in mind to traffic
10/10 thanks for all your contributions to Fable 5.1
then it will have to go after the senator who cant think for themself and asks Claude what to do after accepting the bribe and trying to hide their tracks
I don't think you've fairly summed it up. The title is more accurate than your representation
> In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “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.”
It seems we will soon start seeing all the warnings about the immense risks of giving even a micron on free speech coming back to haunt us with a vengeance.
Soon enough the insane, irrational, and rather schizophrenic, manic, and histrionic reactions to things like "I want to blow the roof off that place", or "blow that place up" being a metaphor for maybe performing really well or maybe exposing something like a corrupt government agency or taking out a competitor; will lead to all kinds of language and tone policing, where you may get a swat team kicking down your door because AI perceived that you said something with a certain tone in your voice.
Just today Gemini policed as something like "harmful or dangerous prompts" for asking "where do I look up if there have been state level indictments/charges against someone".
People keep rightfully calling Trump a wannabe king, but all of these tone/speech and even action policing trends have been going on for many years and even decades now. This is not solely a Trump admin. issue, there has been a continuity of agenda across effectively all administrations for many decades. The exactly number of decades is at this point moot.
1b. Anthroptic refused to provide the police with evidence of said AR-15 wielding person. "Some guy said he's after me, why would I lie about such a thing?"
I would personally be fine with Anthropic disclosing the chat logs, but I can see why they'd prefer not to. No doubt that would have resulted in another complaint about them building a panopticon and sharing people's conversations verbatim with the authorities.
The person doesn't seem to deny having written the messages, or claim that they were flagrantly taken out of context. His response to the media was that he was "just fucking around" and that he didn't want to talk about it.
It's also worth mentioning that this happened in August 2026, after the February 2026 Tumbler Ridge BC shooting. The shooter in that scenario had discussed planning gun violence with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT didn't report it to the authorities, so no follow up happened. Presumably the LLM companies have decided to more aggressively report these things to the police as a result.
yeah, not sure what the right answer here is... but it definitely isn't "trust us, we would never lie (fingers crossed behind back)".
What does a non-AI company do? If I emailed Tim Cook and said I had a gun and was coming for him, I imagine Apple would turn the email over to their security team, who would then go to the local PD/FBI/whoever. I'd expect the same here, at least for anything that resembles a direct threat.
This isn't quite into the pre-crime sci-fi zone yet, IMO. That would be more like "this guy bought a gun, then bought gas out of state, then did something else, therefore he must be planning an assassination". Unfortunately, I expect this situation will end up reported as well, and the police, looking for work to do, will take it as gospel and charge ahead without a second thought (like the recent journalist with a "bad" (aka fat-fingered) license plate).
I think I see where you're coming from, but to me, the analogy falls short.
I think it's because email has the postal system metaphor to work with: I put my letter in an envelope, the post office just forwards it. Similarly, Hotmail does not _need_ knowledge of the contents of my email to forward it to its destination. If you asked a user who had access to their email, they might reasonably expect only the recipient would.
With LLMs, it is quite clear to the user that you are interacting with _something_ that is inspecting your messages and reacting to them. If you asked the user who had access to their inputs, they'd probably say "Claude" or "Anthropic". Thus, when Claude rats them out for threatening violence, they probably wouldn't be that surprised.
To me, this feels much closer to someone phoning up Microsoft's customer support phone number and mentioning that they have a gun and know where Bill Gates lives, and that then resulting in a visit from the police. I do idly wonder if it was intentional that this user had this conversation with Claude, and not, say, with ChatGPT or Gemini.
"It is all just for your safety." and other excuses.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is viable by Anthropic to do so, it is a business decision. Nevertheless the reasons sound contrived and mask the demand for such a lucrative business opportunity, if you abstract it away from activists.
This is not about moral, only about reality.
Maybe Anthropic had a nice chat with the administration and/or think, that this was something, that interests them on a psychological level: predicting human behavior.
Look at Muse from Meta: Meta is doing exactly the same I bet, to optimize their ad business.
Anthropic will sooner or later feature ads, and maybe this is a way to distract from this usage possibility.
Remember, the "No! We don't work with the government, we want privacy for our customers." mantra won't match with "We need to make money and surveillance of our customers would be helpful as well as a cool topic for our engineers to work on."
Anthropic itself will be yet another normal Big Tech company, all, even those who boasted "Don't be evil" or encrypt like hell their smartphones allegedly made good bucks in China.
It is ok, no problem with that by Anthropic just with their hypocrisy in my point of view.
I mean, it's the same sort of slippery slope that the progressive left was saying about the formation of DHS and ICE in the early 2000s that everyone poo-poo'd and said 'no way that'll happen in America' - that these depts would end up being a tools of fascistic repression of political opponents (eg NSPM-7) and a major vehicle for inflicting mass suffering on immigrants of all stripes
Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not. But cautioning skepticism towards multi-billion dollar institutions with a lot of power and how good their intentions really are is never a wrong move, imo
plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding
I don't know how to pull the actual court documents without paying for them, but the article indicates the case was dismissed for lack of standing.
The plaintiffs tried to argue that as neighbours, they had an interest in the land usage being enforced. The court disagreed.
I presume the original family could bring a case? It doesn't seem like the 404 article or the Taylor Press article talked to them to see how _they_ feel about how their gift is being used.
Yes, as we all know big tech absolutely follow the rules and don't skirt regulations. It's clearly the journalists causing the problems and not the government that has a history of ignoring contracts when it benefits them!
Is the idea that "when it benefits them" was... 23 years ago, and then they just sat on the land waiting for big tech to come along and want to buy it?
As mundane as it may sound, it seems most likely this was a clerical error made a long time ago. Maybe it can get unwound, but maybe not. If the people of this town are being screwed, it's by incompetence on someone's part 23 years ago, not by big tech.
Yes, the old "well that's just the law" while ignoring the material effects of said law. They're just following orders after all right? Just ignore the playbook big tech has been using across development boards in America to somehow always get the outcomes they want while civilians suffer with little to no reprecaussions.
The tl;dr: Drew thinks Vim development has been tainted by LLM contributions, and is thus morally unsuitable to be used, and he will therefore be forking it.
I think it's more fair to say that someone shows that a contributor has started to commit much more frequently and constantly breaking things, and that this corresponds to when they have started (self-reportedly) using LLM's for development.
Fair enough - my initial comment talked about quality, but I realized that was my own take on the situation.
I had revised the comment because I think I now understand Drew's chief complaint to be about the moral side of LLM usage, not the practical quality side of LLM usage.
He does use the word "slop" which implicates quality, but that's a single word in his essay, versus whole paragraphs about the moral questions of LLM usage and his stated reason that the fork was "to keep my conscience clear".
Ha, what a coincidence. Just today I was reading a three year old Stackoverflow discussion about this [1].
It prompted Laurenz to submit the documentation patch that is cited in the article. In the discussion of the patch itself, people seem to conclude that it's a good improvement to the docs, but that the behaviour itself is a bit of a footgun. [2]
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
We definitely had a dim view of the Iraq invasion. At the time, I ran a Microsoft recruiting event on campus at University of Waterloo. Students made some widget using whatever framework du jour was popular in order to win a prize. The top-voted widget was one that showed how many Iraqi civilians had been killed by the US so far during the war. Still, we sort of understood: y'all had a legitimate grievance due to 9/11 (just, not, y'know, against Iraq...)
We had a dim view of the first Trump administration. Muslim ban? Trump's anti-vax horseshit during a pandemic? January 6?
And then Americans re-elected him. Whether it's the Nazi stuff, the tariff stuff, the annexation stuff, the trans stuff, the firing the blacks and women stuff, it's just exhausting chaos that was all predictable.
Now we have a dim view of Americans.
There is a benefit, in that I'm hopeful this will be the impetus for Canada to become a more serious country. Still, it's incredibly wasteful. If we retool to trade more with Europe and Asia, both Canada and the US will be poorer for it. But god, it will be worth it.
Yeah, the author seems to be writing for a white male audience in some regards.
My wife and I host bicycle tourers when they pass through our town. One was Thomas Meixner, an East German who started travelling the world on bike when the wall fell. He's visited something like 120 countries and biked 250,000 km.
My wife asked him if he thought a solo woman could do what he did in the places he did it. He tactfully changed the subject.
Canada has begun cracking down on this. There are now caps on the number of visas issued. Foreign students are no longer allowed to work full-time jobs by default while studying. This is especially relevant, because the Comprehensive Ranking System for permanent immigration gives points for years of full-time work experience in Canada, as well as for diplomas earned in Canada.
Unwinding it will be a bit messy: lots of post-secondary institutions have to figure out how run programs with a lot less funding, and what to do with capital projects that no longer make sense in light of greatly reduced enrollment, etc.
The damage done to the average Canadian's view of immigrants will take some time to fade away. But I suspect it will, with time, especially since our traditional immigration system really does just skim the "good" immigrants -- the ones with money and the skills to succeed.
Are you my doppelganger? I made almost this exact comment word-for-word to a friend of mine a few weeks ago.
Trudeau's immigration video from December [1] was one of the most dishonest, condescending productions that I've ever seen, basically amounting to, "Yes, we destroyed our previous internationally respected immigration system and imported five million low skilled laborers over a couple years without adding any housing or infrastructure. Yes, that's hurt a lot of you and made you angry. No, we don't think that's a problem. But because you're so angsty, we'll throttle it back a tiny wittle bit over the next year or two before throwing the floodgates wide open again."
Not a shred of anything even resembling self-awareness or humility throughout.
The most shocking thing to me is the heavy involvement of McKinsey consulting in all this[1]. Feels anti-democratic to let a foreign consulting firm set immigration targets.
That's absolutely bananas. $3 million for a _report_ about suggestions for possible immigration reform (to speed it up of course). In the hole $62 billion a year, and a sizable chunk is going to overpriced MBA grads right out of school to produce PDF documents. How the hell do we reign these people in.
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".