Anthropic yet again confirmed as the most dystopian tech company out there.
Imagine the outcry if they'd done the same thing with Jews or Blacks: a piece of code that detects if a user is Jewish or Black and immediately reports him back to headquarters on that basis, covertly (they used steganography, a technique designed to make data collection invisible).
And before people start screaming fake news, an Anthropic employee confirmed it's real: https://t.co/0ifiv47J6H
It's incidentally - not that it matters - completely illegal under at least half a dozen European laws: not only is collecting ethnic and racial data forbidden (under, for instance, Europe's GDPR Article 9 and national French law) but doing so without the users' awareness or consent is itself a separate violation. And it's even worse in this case because they explicitly tried to hide this data collection with steganography.
And the immense irony, of course, is that this is precisely the kind of covert surveillance behavior the West - including Anthropic themselves - say China would do and that they want to "protect" people from...