This smells like an advanced version of corporate espionage. Assuming most companies will use their AI in the future, this will be fed directly to an Echelon-like network that will be leaking "interesting info" to friendly parties, like the Boeing vs Airbus scandal that was first widely reported and then swept under the rug officially.
Why would a secret espionage program be partially publicized?
If they were doing some secret espionage or government surveillance with the data, they would just do it all in secret.
When there is a precise and legally defined boundary (i.e. ZDR means your data with Bedrock stays within the Amazon security and legal boundary), it becomes significantly more difficult to hide full data egress; without alarm bells being raised / mechanisms being accidentally discovered.
When you have a black box that sends the full stream to Anthropic, then everything (including what actually happens with the data) stays on the Anthropic side.
It's much harder to hide egress/exfil-at-scale completely; even if we assume NSA-level kernel rootkits, someone's still gonna notice "hey, why is this pipe saturated even though `nload` looks normal.
It's much easier to hide what you do with the full data when you have explanations for why you're doing egress/exfil.
Limited hangout. There's a Netflix documentary about Danny Casolaro that does a decent job summarising events, but I'm surprised I don't see much about Inslaw/PROMIS, and more than a decade on, it's as if Snowden never happened.
Smells more like a secret agreement with the government.