mis Anthropic: The Greatest Heist
Just when everyone seems to be talking about the rise of AI, the cannibalization of entire industries and loss of white-collar employment to the Tech Overlords of the Universe, an insider says time to hang it up. Mrinank Sharma, who was apparently leading Anthropic in safeguards research, took a moment to wax eloquent about the state of the human condition:
‘The world is in peril. And not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of crises unfolding at this very moment.”
OMG, take your meds brother. Sounds like he was watching an old sci-fi movie about AI from 1970, like Colossus the Forbidden Project or maybe he understands that cannibalism is a real thing – who knew – and watched Bone Tomahawk from 2015 and freaked himself out. There is help available. He says he is moving to the UK, going to disappear for a while. Sure, because free speech is moving along in the reverse direction over there along with driving on the opposite side of the road.
How about this, the world is in peril because there is a gigantic heist going on in front of our very eyes and nobody is really doing anything about it!
Let us begin with Anthropic itself. The first heist was from the ‘founders’ who jumped ship from over at OpenAI. According to Wikipedia, seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom was OpenAI’s Vice President of Research, were the original founders of Anthropic. Then, magically, a $500 million investment from another con artist, Sam Bankman-Fried, appears to bootstrap the company from funding partner FTX. [Even larger infusions of capital ensued from the likes of Amazon, Nvidia, and Google – things that make you go hmmm…
The second rip off is worse. Also, from Wikipedia Anthropic – Wikipedia
In January 2026, unsealed court filings from a 2024 class-action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic revealed the existence of the company’s confidential “Project Panama” operation. In an internal planning document, Project Panama is described as Anthropic’ s “effort to destructively scan all the books in the world”.[81] To this end, the company purchased millions of used books from online retailers such as Better World Books, sliced off their spines and scanned their pages in order to train Claude.[81][82] The paper was then recycled. Tom Turvey, who helped create Google Books, was hired for the operation. According to the Project Panama planning document, Anthropic did not “want it to be known that [it was] working on this”.[81] Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction of legally purchased books constituted fair use, in contrast to Anthropic’s prior use of pirated copies.[81][82]
Really? Book burning, book banning, and now book destruction (kind of, I mean, we did read them all first) – not a good trend line here, kind of like a more violent version of Fahrenheit 451. And to be fair, all these Large Language Model companies have done this content rip off to a lesser and even greater degree if that is even possible.
We have said this before; we will say it again: let the user beware. AI is moving quickly, perhaps faster than it otherwise would if we had normal protection and legal recourse from our schools, our places of work and our federal agencies. But we do not which makes this whole mess a kind of Lasse Faire fight. So, if you care about such things, you need to oversee your own vigilance.
If you are a consumer, just know that everything you say, write, read, etc., can and will be recorded particularly if you have a listening device (Alexa, Mobile Device, Smart TV…) with you. Need proof. Look at this terrible story of Savannah Guthrie’s kidnapped mother. Savannah Guthrie’s Mom’s Alleged Abductor’s ‘Rookie’ Mistake Exposed After Release Of Chilling Footage. According to Andy Kay, a private investigator, the cameras mounted in Nancy’s home “will record to the servers as long as they have internet access. He further claimed that Nancy’s security camera provider, Nest, confirms that this will occur even without an active subscription.”
We do hope and pray for the safe return of Mrs. Guthrie.
It took the FBI approximately eight days to release the video. Why so long? Good questions for the FBI but also for Google who owns Nest. Perhaps the bigger question is, so you – Google – are basically recording everything even if I am not paying or authorizing you to do so? Nice. What else are you doing with my data? Call the Tech Bros in for a Congressional shake down: Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft – we want answers.
If you are a student, you have a choice to make. You can get a great education, or you can hit the easy button. Most applications of AI are still a glorified search tool. Do you remember those Super Bowl Ads from last Sunday? No creating, reasoning, or problem solving. Type in the question, get an answer. A dog fetching a bone. Unfortunately, you will be a bone head if all you do is learn to use someone’s AI. If you need help, particularly with Math and Science or anything actually, go talk with a real person. Specifically, if your school offers tutoring services or office hours, take the opportunity and go. If they do not offer this, then try watching videos from tutoring services like Kahn Academy. At the very least you will see a real person working through a thought process towards solving a problem. Remember, it is not just one grade in one class we are talking about, it is your future potential and creativity that you risk diminishing by not digging in deep and doing the challenging work now.
Some tech leaders say that higher education is a thing of the past, do not study medicine because in the future we will not need doctors, and AI will surpass humans in every cognitive dimension. They are seriously in the business of misleading you about the integral role of real people doing real work in the here and now.
If you are a business, the final heist continues unabated. It is the systematic rip off of your intellectual capital and your future opportunities. What are you talking about? Your data of course. As a business, every time you interact with an LLM, through a hyperscaler or otherwise you are losing your shirt without the right guardrails in place. It is your data, information about you, your customers, your partners, your products, and your business process. Some companies are going as far as to pay Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI for the privilege of getting ripped off. And, if they are not doing this directly, they have covert mechanisms to help them with the robbery.
The Wall Street Journal reports Job Seekers Find a New Source of Income: Training AI to Do …
Mercor, has hired specialists in medicine, law, finance, engineering, and the arts, to train AI systems. Paid $45 to $250 per hour for weeks or months of reviewing and refining model outputs for giants like OpenAI and Anthropic…
Perfect, kill your past employer, suicide yourself, and murder your children. What a wonderful business model. For people who fail to realize what they are really worth.
When you build applications with us at CloudNineData, it is your data. You own it and the infrastructure. We help companies get control of their data, we build resilient AI applications, and we can help you move ahead of your competition through methodical adoption of AI. If you are lazy and you let them, the Tech Bros will eat my lunch, your lunch, and everything in between. You cannot slow the adoption of AI, but you can have a significant impact on your own destiny if you choose to act quickly and decisively to protect yourself and enhance your business.