There are pieces of your life scattered all over the internet, and some of them are for sale. Data brokers amass web searches, financial records, and location data from millions of individuals and sell them to various clients, including the US government. Information on your recent online purchases or the route that you take to work could be sitting on hard drives around the world, waiting to be used. While reassembling those pieces isn’t trivial, there is early evidence that LLMs might make it far easier. LLM agents could potentially do the work of intelligence analysts in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost, which would enable the state to aim its all-seeing eye toward anyone, not just its highest-priority targets. “A lot of what we think of as privacy protection isn’t so much like something that’s written in the law,” says Karen Levy, a professor of information science at Cornell University. “It just has to do with how hard or how expensive it is to learn stuff about people.” When mobile phones became widespread, gathering data about people got much cheaper, but making use of that data remained difficult. Powerful LLMs could change that. Worries over how LLMs could facilitate mass surveillance recently made headlines around the world. According to reporting from the New York Times and the Atlantic, contract negotiations between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense fell apart in late February because Anthropic balked when the DOD demanded leeway to use the company’s models to analyze commercially available data on US citizens. When Anthropic’s rival OpenAI agreed to a DOD deal mere hours later, OpenAI faced an immediate wave of public backlash for apparently swanning past Anthropic’s red lines. Under pressure, OpenAI and the DOD later revised the contract terms.