cldellow

Is the argument that 45% of Washingtonians (the portion that doesn't vote in midterm elections) are homeless?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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".