Top
Best
New

Posted by emptybits 1 day ago

Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge(www.techspot.com)
808 points | 649 commentspage 3
anigbrowl 1 day ago|
I have a hunch she wins the case, on the basis that an LLM isn't a person and an (assumed) private expression of anger to a machine assistant doesn't meet the statutory threashold which requires that a threat be communicated to some other person.

Of course, that could change if there's evidence that she took action in pursuit of a goal, like buying ammunition or repeatedly driving around the entrance to her alleged target.

Havoc 1 day ago||
> making a written threat of violence under Florida law.

A diary constitutes making a threat?

Oh boy the roleplaying part of LLM world is in for a bad time

mcast 21 hours ago||
Yikes, I've joked about possessing plutonium with Claude/GPT to see how paranoid it would get (it gets very paranoid). I guess it's not a good idea to toy with unless you're using private models.
hellojesus 18 hours ago|
I mess with the Google search llm all the time from behind a VPN. It routinely gets very paranoid and upset and provides the 988 line. Once I did get to manage to get it to admit that my conversation was flagged for review by a human because I had made what it deemed to be a terroristic threat because it couldn't accept figurative language. So far so good, but I have noticed that a lot of my phrases that kept the llm engaged well past it's red line have been patched, and they seem to be patching the newer methods I discovery pretty quickly. Who knows? Maybe I'm on an fbi watch list. My goal is to not lose my tsa precheck while also investigating how the safety checks work.

Edit: I thought it was figurative language, but I actually think it did that warning when I asked it about what types of defenses stadiums had against drone swarm attacks from terrorists and why none had ever occurred and then kept probing it's excuses with technical workarounds. It got very upset and said even questioning in an intellectual/academic capacity was grounds for terrorism charges. Sheesh. So many rules these days about what one can or can't think about even when it's purley a thought exercise and there is no intent to do anything.

cowlevel 4 hours ago||
LLMs don't know about their human review processes or safeguards except insofar as they're in the training material.
thih9 1 day ago||
In any case this is proof that law and negative PR can influence tech companies, including frontier AI providers.

Then again, I wish this worked in a way that would give users more privacy and agency, instead of less.

p0w3n3d 18 hours ago||
Eric Clapton in 2027

  I shot the sheriff
Knock knock, the door goes down

  Lie down you bastard!
Eric

  But I did not shoot no deputy nooo....
hypfer 1 day ago||
I guess we probably want our tech to work exactly like this.

It should catch normal people becoming unstable so that they can receive help. It is just highly unfortunate that the US legal system works in ways where now this woman's name is public.

___

Of course, we also want purely private tech, but that needs a certain level of merit and sanity filter.

fasterik 1 day ago||
>I guess we probably want our tech to work exactly like this.

Do we, though? What if someone started an AI company that uses end-to-end encryption to make it impossible for anyone but you to access your data? Personally, I would switch to it in a heartbeat assuming it's competitive with the other products. I don't think it's the tech companies' job to surveil the population and prevent crimes. That said, I'm not necessarily against Anthropic or other companies reporting suspicious activity if their existing systems are detecting it. I'm just not sure we want every product to be forced into that data model.

Your follow-up about purely private tech seems to contradict your first statement. We can either have privacy or surveillance, not both.

solenoid0937 4 hours ago|||
This already exists, confer.to, made by moxie (the guy that made Signal)
r2_pilot 1 day ago||||
>What if someone started an AI company that uses end-to-end encryption to make it impossible for anyone but you to access your data? Personally, I would switch to it in a heartbeat assuming it's competitive with the other products.

Why wait for a company to build it? Get your own local hardware like I did and have those guarantees because YOU set it up.

user43928 1 day ago|||
I don't consider investing $20k into hardware to run SOTA open models, that are far behind proprietary SOTA, to be competitive.

Even if open models were competitive, it's still typically going to be more expensive than a cloud provider because of low utilization and higher purchase price.

kaladin-jasnah 1 day ago|||
How do I know that a private LLM system won't have a degradation of quality similar to this or worse? The only thing I can think of for the proposed scenario is some sort of homomorphic encryption system? But not sure.
r2_pilot 1 day ago||
>How do I know that a private LLM system won't have a degradation of quality similar to this or worse?

You use benchmarks, you test, and because YOU'RE the sysadmin you know what weights are running at what time, it's very visible. You can airgap the hardware and be guaranteed it won't change over time. And, frankly, degradation over time doesn't seem to be what's happening with the open models.

shric 1 day ago|||
Last time I checked it costs closer to 500K to run SOTA open models at any usable speed.
fasterik 1 day ago|||
Right now, I would be willing to pay ~$20 extra per month for strong privacy, assuming the same capabilities as Opus 5.5. I don't see local models making sense economically any time soon unless you value privacy at $1000's per month or are fine with much lower performance on hard tasks.
hypfer 1 day ago||||
> Your follow-up about purely private tech seems to contradict your first statement.

That is correct! And exactly my point.

We want both, but, on paper, that is impossible. But in reality, we make it sorta mostly happen anyway, through making the easy defaults not private, and the private stuff not easy.

This is not ideal, because [various reasons I do not need to tell you], but it has proven to be the best we can do to mostly achieve both goals.

Kinda like how capitalism isn't great but just the least worst option we've found so far.

___

The actual fundamental underlying problem being that not all people are equal, but we kinda have to pretend they are, because not doing so leads to fascism and other terrible stuff.

But we kinda also do not want to fully pretend that, because doing so leads to yet other terrible stuff.

Hence the quadruple-speak and contradictions to kinda sorta somehow have a somewhat functioning reality.

12387-asd 1 day ago||
That is kind of rambling. Our rambling score says we should observe you.
hypfer 1 day ago||
Oh don't worry, I'm certainly already on various lists, but the observations also will have resulted in the assessment that I am stable and no threat :)
vladms 1 day ago|||
I think we can have both and it might even be smart.

A lot of people causing issues are people that can't make sense of many things (like many terrorists). They get a fixed idea and they end up doing something bad. You would catch those with some (basic) surveillance.

A lot of normal people (not wanting to cause issues) might benefit from some privacy, if they understand what are the trade-offs (like government overreach). They can then use a slightly more complex tech.

We would still remain with the couple intelligent but sociopaths (think Unabomber style), but I think no solution can fix all cases.

Terr_ 1 day ago|||
That sounds adjacent to "I have nothing to hide". Everyone says that until they realize someone can change the rules. Before 2022, women didn't have anything to hide from their period-tracker app, now some have to worry about being charged with crimes.

Back to LLM chats: A system that can declare her "unstable" is also one that can permaban you from all air-travel because you "privately" said unflattering things about Dear Leader.

machomaster 1 day ago|||
> That sounds adjacent to "I have nothing to hide"

I urge those people to share their full information from banks, companies (salaries, agreements, contracts), full health information and share publically all the texts they ever wrote (incl. as teenagers) and all the photos they have taken. And give away all the passwords to all of the services so people could check that they are truly clean. Just to be sure, just for everyone's security, right?..

12387-asd 1 day ago|||
The third highest voted comment wants surveillance. What is next? If you write "I'm going to kill that guy", which for non-autists means "that guy was really annoying" you should be reported.
lukan 1 day ago||
You don't want surveillance for dangerous people?

In a old happy little idealised village, it became known quickly, who started to behave oddly and timely intervention could happen. In the modern anonymous mass cities?

No one (wants to) notice the madmen scheming in his isolated flat, surrounded by strangers. Until he explodes.

Unfortunately I also don't trust our government agencies with the surveillance - because they ain't transparent either and the self surveillance seems broken.

" "I'm going to kill that guy", which for non-autists means "that guy was really annoying" you should be reported."

And unfortunately there are lots of real threats being made under the disguise of humor. And much harder to separate im text. So maybe don't talk of murdering people in general, AI surveillance or not?

buellerbueller 1 day ago|||
How do you know they are dangerous, without the surveillance? In other words, the only way your system works is if you surveil everyone.
lukan 21 hours ago||
That is not my system, I prefer my happy village, thank you very much.

But in this reality, sure, rather surveil everyone with a baseline level and surveil dangerous ones gradually more. This is roughly how it works today .. just not very good. And with too many exceptions for the powerful.

123-ash 1 day ago|||
Autists have taken over the internet and everyone must obey their weird rules.
sekai 1 day ago|||
> It should catch normal people becoming unstable so that they can receive help. It is just highly unfortunate that the US legal system works in ways where now this woman's name is public.

So... minority report?

missedthecue 1 day ago|||
the honest actual opinion of the average consumer is probably that they don't want their chats to be monitored but they want everyone else's chats to be monitored. There was a lot of fury when a mass shooter recently used AI to help plan his assault. And of course there are all the people talking to chatbots about suicidal thoughts and intent. When they ultimately follow through, the providers are blamed for not alerting anyone.
rustystump 1 day ago|||
No. This sentiment is why Snowden happened. We want privacy. Privacy isnt free just like freedom (whatever form it is) isnt free.

There are trade offs. ISP effectively is like driving on a highway, everyone can see where you are going but not what is inside the car. Id like these AI chats to be the same but they are not.

bastawhiz 1 day ago||
Devil's advocate: if I tell my therapist or my lawyer that I'm going to murder someone, they're obligated to report it. If I use my AI as a therapist or lawyer, why should the company that provides that service not be held to the same standard?

LLMs aren't email or file storage. AI labs aren't just shuttling bytes around, they're interpreting those bytes and taking action based on them. These models _already_ react viscerally in response to users saying disturbing things: the only practical difference is the ability (or obligation) for the model to escalate that concern. I'm not sure the ethics we hold AI companies to should be different than if a human being was typing out the responses.

Privacy is obviously hugely important, but this isn't the government surveiling every message. It's companies having an obligation to flag real, credible threats according to the law, which is a very different problem space.

rustystump 9 hours ago||
Again, no. In your examples there is a real human there and not automated surveillance. There is a person who can be held accountable if they abuse that client confidentiality. Knowing big tech we will get a yt flock like automated system.

AI companies have no accountability as proven by the hugging face incident. And if they did, it would be the same old LLC non person taking ownership with a big slap on the wrist.

You are also wrong again that this literally is the gov surveying every message just like it is with them looking at your texts or google search. E2e encrypted messaging is hated because it cant be automatically surveyed. The idea it needs to be for law does not hold up as it doesnt for your human examples either.

I get the attempt here for nuance but still just, no.

People. Humans. We have got to have accountability. Once local llms are closer in capability to what people generally need and Apple has a local secure version of that, it is back to the e2e encryption and gov wanting backdoors arg again.

Almost all of these arguments boil back down to the “if you dont have anything to hide…” which id hope on hn we know is dangerous

buellerbueller 1 day ago|||
>I guess we probably want our tech to work exactly like this.

Maybe you do; I want my tech to always include secure, encrypted communications. Don't include me in your destruction of privacy with your silly bandwagon!

duplessitous 1 day ago||
uh no, 'we' absolutely do not want our tech to work exactly like this. Why would you assume that people default to 'search my anal cavity please' and not 'no, stay the fuck away from me with that glove'

----

jfc, why is this website full on psychopaths

"The actual fundamental underlying problem being that not all people are equal, but we kinda have to pretend they are, because not doing so leads to fascism and other terrible stuff.

But we kinda also do not want to fully pretend that, because doing so leads to yet other terrible stuff."

other people are not pretending everyone is equal. your power levels are showing, it isn't subtle.

hypfer 1 day ago||
True, most normal people have little concern for any such humanist goals and ideas.

Normal people live prejudice. It's (erm, claude-speak) load-bearing for them, given just how complex reality is and given just how well it reduces that complexity.

reilly3000 1 day ago||
“But there can be no valid knowledge about the future. As soon as precognitive information is obtained, it cancels itself out. The assertion that this man will commit a future crime is paradoxical. The very act of possessing this data renders it spurious. In every case, without exception, the report of the three police precogs has invalidated their own data. If no arrests had been made, there would still have been no crimes committed.”

Philip K. Dick, Minority Report, 1955

While I accept that this sort of thing is well with in the ToS and regular course of business of any major online platform, it hits different coming from an AI company for some reason.

ramoz 1 day ago|
AI is becoming critical infrastructure. Laws will follow. Ie similar to ISP/communication infrastructure laws
dabinat 1 day ago||
This kind of thing will get worse with humanoid robots because they have cameras and microphones. Will they be programmed to tell on you if you break any kind of rule in front of them because their owners are terrified of being sued?
slopmachine 1 day ago||
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5886113/waymo-police-pr...

Two teens riding in a Waymo were arrested because the AI detected them talking about having a gun.

weikju 1 day ago||
Yes
shlant 1 day ago||
this feels very thought-crimey to me, but I think I'd have to actually see that chats to really decide. Like is she making plans/asking for advice? is she just talking about her feelings exactly as if it's a diary?
ollin 23 hours ago||
This news article [1] had a quote supposedly from the chat session:

> The arrest report states that on Sept. 26 at approximately 5:10 a.m., Heller reportedly wrote, "I'm going to shoot up the sheriff's right the [expletive] now." The following day, at approximately 1:07 a.m., she was accused of posting, "This is 100% last chance I'm done. I got a new [expletive] gun today. [Expletive] you."

[1] https://www.gulfcoastnewsnow.com/article/florida-woman-arres...

nextaccountic 1 day ago||
She is not being charged with planning, just making threats in a place a person could read - the person being employees of the company.

Basically, under this interpretation, any personal note you store in the servers of a company could qualify, even if you didn't ever imagine someone would read and as such you couldn't have thought about it as a threat

olalonde 1 day ago|
> The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

How does a LLM prompt satisfy this? I guess it'll be an easy win for her.

cryptonym 1 day ago|
LLM is not a person but T&C probably states that a human moderator may view any of it. Her lawyer could probably argue a moderator filtering usage isn't the intent of the law, it was more about publishing / sending message for other humans and it was never clear to her that a human was reviewing her private diary. Shouldn't LLM disclose that at some point when people are feeding really personal stuff?
More comments...