I wanted to start this post off by being all panicky and saying that I’m swearing off Claude because The Gub’ment shouldn’t be using the same AI as I do because it’s not cool anymore. Or something.

Looking at this situation, I can say the following:

• I do not like Palantir. I mean, their name is from the extremely dangerous stones from Lord of The Rings.
• I’m generally wary of private companies getting buddy-buddy with Government agencies as a rule.
• I’m not sure this even matters.

Sure, yes, buddying up with Palantir and the Government is not a good look to me. But adding Claude to whatever services their running doesn’t seem like as much of a panic inducing event that will upend the very nature of the relationship between people, technology and the surveillance state. That ship sailed long before we had Claude, or ChatGPT. I’m not sure this is going to make that shitberg any shittier.

Plus, it’s not like the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. haven’t been using these tools since long before we got access to them. I mean, the surveillance state didn’t just pop out, fully formed from some politically connected stalker’s forehead. We’ve had it for a while now. Nothing about this article changes anything.

If anything happens, I’m pretty sure that Claude-clones may end up fielding calls from (understandably) very irate veterans and social security recipients instead of a human who can help them. That and probably sifting through mountains of profile data to discover ‘undesirables’ that they could ship off to Club MedThe United States of El Salvador Concentration Camp. Wait, they’re already doing that without this. Damn. Um, I dunno, probably some vibe coding or something.