Senior Technology Reporter at The Intercept
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Sam Biddle
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Anthropic Says We Must Stop Authoritarian AI. But What About Its Authoritarian Investors?
...And it's US national security first agenda?
by @sambiddle.com
theintercept.com/2026/06/06/a...
I wrote a new post about the privacy risks of on-phone agents like Apple’s new Siri, and how private inference isn’t any sort of silver bullet. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/06/09/a...
Based on all this, I think it would be accurate to say that Anthropic either opposes or embraces authoritarian governments depending on what's advantageous. This is, of course, a completely different proposition than the principled blanket anti-authoritarianism they claim.
I also found historical DNS records showing that G42, the Abu Dhabi AI firm tied to a string of state hacking/surveillance ops, added a TXT entry to enable domain authentication for Anthropic services. Worth keeping in mind when the company warns of frontier model use by repressive govs.
(G42 and MGX, which has twice invested in Anthropic's Series G and H rounds, are both chaired by Sheikh Tahnoun)
Sam Biddle
Sam Biddle
What does it mean to claim you oppose authoritarian governments and then, twice, sell part of your company to an authoritarian government? I wanted to talk to Anthropic about this but they declined to comment.
Anthropic keeps claiming it opposes authoritarian governments. Anthropic also keeps taking money from an Authoritarian government. It's a glaring contradiction the company refuses to discuss. theintercept.com/2026/06/06/a...
Anthropic's UAE investor is controlled by an individual central to a litany of hacking and state surveillance scandals in service of human rights abuses. Exactly what they say is so dangerous about China. www.wired.com/story/uae-in...
Anthropic keeps claiming it opposes authoritarian governments. Anthropic also keeps taking money from an Authoritarian government. It's a glaring contradiction the company refuses to discuss. theintercept.com/2026/06/06/a...
Sam Biddle
Ron Deibert
Sam Biddle
Matthew Green
Sam Biddle
Sam Biddle
Sam Biddle
Yesterday Apple announced a big step towards deploying real AI in their Siri ecosystem. In most ways this is good and inevitable: Siri is one of the world’s most widely-used voice agents, and…
