Category: Articles

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

which turns cop cars into all-seeing surveillance patrols. All of this is conducted together with Microsoft and hosted on the Azure Government Cloud.

Last month, hundreds of Microsoft employees petitioned their CEO, Satya Nadella, to cancel contracts with law enforcement agencies, support Black Lives Matter, and endorse defunding the police. In response, Microsoft ignored the complaint and instead banned sales of its own facial recognition software to police in the United States, directing eyes away from Microsoft’s other contributions to police surveillance. The strategy worked: The press and activists alike praised the move, reinforcing Microsoft’s said position as a moral leader in tech.

Yet it’s not clear how long Microsoft will escape major scrutiny. Policing is increasingly done with active cooperation from tech companies, and Microsoft, along with Amazon and other cloud providers, is one of the major players in this space.

Because partnerships and services hosting third party vendors on the Azure cloud do not have to be announced to the public, it is impossible to know full extent of Microsoft’s involvement in the policing domain, or the status of publicly announced third party services, potentially including some of the previously announced relationships mentioned below.

Microsoft: From Police Intelligence to the Azure Cloud

In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft made major contributions to centralized intelligence centers for law enforcement agencies. Around 2009, it began working on a surveillance platform for the NYPD called the Domain Awareness System, or DAS, which was unveiled to the public in 2012. The system was built with leadership from Microsoft along with NYPD officers.
While some details about the DAS have been disclosed to the public, many are still missing. The most comprehensive account to date appeared in a 2017 paper by NYPD officers
.
The DAS integrates disparate sources of information to perform three core functions: real-time alerting, investigations, and police analytics.
Through the DAS, the NYPD watches the personal movements of the entire city. In its early days, the system ingested information from closed-circuit TV cameras, environmental sensors (to detect radiation and dangerous chemicals), and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. By 2010, it began adding geocoded NYPD records of complaints, arrests, 911 calls, and warrants “to give context to the sensor data.” Thereafter, it added video analytics, automatic pattern recognition, predictive policing, and a mobile app for cops.

By 2016, the system had ingested 2 billion license plate images from ALPR cameras (3 million reads per day, archived for five years), 15 million complaints, more than 33 billion public records, over 9,000 NYPD and privately operated camera feeds, videos from 20,000-plus body cameras, and more. To make sense of it all, analytics algorithms pick out relevant data, including for predictive policing.

The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.

While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.

Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations.

Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.

Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.

Microsoft’s Surveillance-Based IoT Patrol Car

The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.

While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.

Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations.

Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.

Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.

According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.

While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”

solution, AutoVu. A proximity camera on the vehicle is designed to alert the officers when their vehicle is being approached.

Patrolling the skies is a drone provided by Microsoft partner Aeryon Labs, the SkyRanger, to provide real-time streaming video. (Aeryon Labs is now part of surveillance giant FLIR Systems.) According to Nathan Beckham of Microsoft Public Safety and Justice, the vehicle’s drones “follow it around and see a bigger view of it.” The drones, writes DroneLife, can “provide aerial views to the integrated data platform, allowing officers to assess ongoing situations in real time, or to gather forensic evidence from a crime scene.”

Police robots are also part of the MAPP platform. Products from ReconRobotics, for example, “integrat[ed] with Microsoft’s Patrol Car of the Future Program” in 2016. Microsoft says ReconRobotics provides their MAPP vehicle with a “small, lightweight but powerful robot” that “can be easily deployed and remotely controlled by patrol officers to provide real-time information to decision-makers.”

Another Microsoft partner, SuperDroid Robots, has also announced they will provide the Microsoft MAPP vehicle with two compact remote-controlled surveillance robots, the MLT “Jack Russell” and the LT2-F “Bloodhound,” the latter of which can climb stairs and obstacles.

Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.”

Although it sports a Microsoft insignia on the hood and door, the physical vehicle the company uses to promote MAPP isn’t for sale by Microsoft, and you probably won’t see Microsoft-labeled cars driving around. Rather, Microsoft provides MAPP as a platform through which to transform existing cop cars into IoT surveillance vehicles: “It’s really about being able to take all this data and put it up in the cloud, being able to source that data with their data, and start making relevant information out of it,” said Beckham.

Indeed, Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.” According to Beckham, the information collected and stored in the Azure cloud will help officers “identify bad actors” and “let the officers be aware of the environment that is going on around them.” As an example, he said, “We’re hoping with machine learning and AI in the future, we can start pattern matching” with MAPP vehicles providing data to help find “bad actors.”

Last October, South African police announced Microsoft partnered with the city of Durban for “21st century” smart policing. Durban’s version of the the MAPP solution includes a 360-degree ALPR to scan license plates and a facial recognition camera from Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision for use when the vehicle is stationary (e.g., parked at an event)

According to South African news outlet ITWeb, the metro police will use the MAPP solution “to deter criminal activities based on data analysis through predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms.” The vehicle has already been rolled out in Cape Town, where Microsoft recently opened a new Azure data center — an extension of the digital colonialism I wrote about in 2018.

Microsoft: Powering CCTV and Police Intelligence in the City

Beyond wiring police vehicles, video surveillance provides another lucrative source of profits for Microsoft, as it is loaded with data packets to transmit, store, and process — earning fees each step of the way.
When building a CCTV network packed with cameras, cities and businesses typically use a video management system, or VMS, to do things like display multiple camera feeds on a video wall or offer the option to search through footage. A leading VMS provider, Genetec, offers the core VMS integrated into Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System. A close partner of Microsoft for over 20 years, the two companies work together on integrating surveillance services on the Azure cloud.

Microsoft’s MAPP patrol vehicle in Durban sports a facial recognition camera from China-based Hikvision. Photos taken from Multimedia Live presentation, ‘Metro police go high-tech for festive season.

Some of the most high-profile city police forces are using Genetec and Microsoft for video surveillance and analytics.

Through a public-private partnership called Operation Shield, Atlanta’s camera network has grown from 17 downtown cameras to a wide net of 10,600 cameras that officials hope will soon cover all city quadrants. Genetec and Microsoft Azure power the CCTV network.

On June 14, Atlanta’s Chief of Police, Erika Shields, resigned after APD cops shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks. Last month, six Atlanta police officers were charged for using excessive force against protesters of police violence.

Department — the second-largest police force in the country. In 2017, Genetec custom-built their Citigraf platform for the Chicago Police Department — the second-largest police force in the country — as a way to make sense of the department’s vast array of data. Powered by Microsoft Azure, Citigraf ingests information from surveillance sensors and database records. Using real-time and historical data, it performs calculations, visualizations, alerts, and other tasks to create “deep situational awareness” for the CPD. Microsoft is partnering with Genetec to build a “correlation engine” to make sense of the surveillance data.

Chicago’s police force has a brutal history of racism, corruption, and even two decades’ worth of torturing suspects. During police violence protests following Floyd’s murder, the CPD attacked and beat protesters, including five Black protesters to the point of hospitalization.

Chicago’s police force has a brutal history of racism, corruption, and even two decades’ worth of torturing suspects. During police violence protests following Floyd’s murder, the CPD attacked and beat protesters, including five Black protesters to the point of hospitalization

In 2017, Genetec custom-built their Citigraf platform for the Chicago Police Department — the second-largest police force in the country — as a way to make sense of the department’s vast array of data. Powered by Microsoft Azure, Citigraf ingests information from surveillance sensors and database records. Using real-time and historical data, it performs calculations, visualizations, alerts, and other tasks to create “deep situational awareness” for the CPD. Microsoft is partnering with Genetec to build a “correlation engine” to make sense of the surveillance data.

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of

color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

which turns cop cars into all-seeing surveillance patrols. All of this is conducted together with Microsoft and hosted on the Azure Government Cloud.

Last month, hundreds of Microsoft employees petitioned their CEO, Satya Nadella, to cancel contracts with law enforcement agencies, support Black Lives Matter, and endorse defunding the police. In response, Microsoft ignored the complaint and instead banned sales of its own facial recognition software to police in the United States, directing eyes away from Microsoft’s other contributions to police surveillance. The strategy worked: The press and activists alike praised the move, reinforcing Microsoft’s said position as a moral leader in tech.

Yet it’s not clear how long Microsoft will escape major scrutiny. Policing is increasingly done with active cooperation from tech companies, and Microsoft, along with Amazon and other cloud providers, is one of the major players in this space.

Because partnerships and services hosting third party vendors on the Azure cloud do not have to be announced to the public, it is impossible to know full extent of Microsoft’s involvement in the policing domain, or the status of publicly announced third party services, potentially including some of the previously announced relationships mentioned below.

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of

color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

which turns cop cars into all-seeing surveillance patrols. All of this is conducted together with Microsoft and hosted on the Azure Government Cloud.

Last month, hundreds of Microsoft employees petitioned their CEO, Satya Nadella, to cancel contracts with law enforcement agencies, support Black Lives Matter, and endorse defunding the police. In response, Microsoft ignored the complaint and instead banned sales of its own facial recognition software to police in the United States, directing eyes away from Microsoft’s other contributions to police surveillance. The strategy worked: The press and activists alike praised the move, reinforcing Microsoft’s said position as a moral leader in tech.

Yet it’s not clear how long Microsoft will escape major scrutiny. Policing is increasingly done with active cooperation from tech companies, and Microsoft, along with Amazon and other cloud providers, is one of the major players in this space.

Because partnerships and services hosting third party vendors on the Azure cloud do not have to be announced to the public, it is impossible to know full extent of Microsoft’s involvement in the policing domain, or the status of publicly announced third party services, potentially including some of the previously announced relationships mentioned below.

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of

color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform,

which turns cop cars into all-seeing surveillance patrols. All of this is conducted together with Microsoft and hosted on the Azure Government Cloud.

Last month, hundreds of Microsoft employees petitioned their CEO, Satya Nadella, to cancel contracts with law enforcement agencies, support Black Lives Matter, and endorse defunding the police. In response, Microsoft ignored the complaint and instead banned sales of its own facial recognition software to police in the United States, directing eyes away from Microsoft’s other contributions to police surveillance. The strategy worked: The press and activists alike praised the move, reinforcing Microsoft’s said position as a moral leader in tech.

Yet it’s not clear how long Microsoft will escape major scrutiny. Policing is increasingly done with active cooperation from tech companies, and Microsoft, along with Amazon and other cloud providers, is one of the major players in this space.

Because partnerships and services hosting third party vendors on the Azure cloud do not have to be announced to the public, it is impossible to know full extent of Microsoft’s involvement in the policing domain, or the status of publicly announced third party services, potentially including some of the previously announced relationships mentioned below.

In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft made major contributions to centralized intelligence centers for law enforcement agencies. Around 2009, it began working on a surveillance platform for the NYPD called the Domain Awareness System, or DAS, which was unveiled to the public in 2012. The system was built with leadership from Microsoft along with NYPD officer

While some details about the DAS have been disclosed to the public, many are still missing. The most comprehensive account to date appeared in a 2017 paper by NYPD officers

The DAS integrates disparate sources of information to perform three core functions: real-time alerting, investigations, and police analytics.

Through the DAS, the NYPD watches the personal movements of the entire city. In its early days, the system ingested information from closed-circuit TV cameras, environmental sensors (to detect radiation and dangerous chemicals), and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. By 2010, it began adding geocoded NYPD records of complaints, arrests, 911 calls, and warrants “to give context to the sensor data.” Thereafter, it added video analytics, automatic pattern recognition, predictive policing, and a mobile app for cops.

By 2016, the system had ingested 2 billion license plate images from ALPR cameras (3 million reads per day, archived for five years), 15 million complaints, more than 33 billion public records, over 9,000 NYPD and privately operated camera feeds, videos from 20,000-plus body cameras, and more. To make sense of it all, analytics algorithms pick out relevant data, including for predictive policing.

 

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of

color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

Last month, AI supergiant and Department of Defense contractor Anthropic found itself embroiled with the Pentagon over the use of its AI for military purposes. On Feb. 14, Axios reported that the Pentagon was considering severing ties with Anthropic, which insisted on guardrails for its use of AI by the military. The conflict became public two days after the press revealed the American military used Anthropic’s Claude AI to help capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Tensions soon boiled over. Anthropic pushed back, and on Feb. 24, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum: allow unrestricted use of Anthropic’s platform by the Department of Defense or get canceled. Trump followed suit, threatening to ban all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s technology and label the company a supply chain risk. On March 5, the Pentagon followed through, stating it has “officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.” This marks the first time such a sanction has been applied to a U.S. company. In response, Anthropic is suing the Pentagon over the risk label.

According to the company’s public relations, many media accounts and some tech workers, the episode is proof that the corporation aims to “do good” and put people over profits.

But is this really true? Is Anthropic really concerned with the lives shattered by U.S. militarism, and the American Empire in general, or is it pushing familiar Big Tech public relations asserting commitments to humanitarian values?

The answer is unquestionably the latter. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, was happily offering its services to the military prior to this episode; and it is not in any meaningful way “resisting” the Pentagon. Anthropic remains woven into the fabric of the American Empire by virtue of its attempt to colonize the global AI economy in conjunction with other U.S. tech giants. This cannot be separated from the military applications of its technology.

Let’s dig in.

Partners in militarism: Anthropic’s services to American Empire are not new

In Nov. 7, 2024, Palantir proudly announced “a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS.” The partnership would “[allow] for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP).” The arrangement, Palantir stated, “will equip U.S. defense and intelligence organizations with powerful AI tools that can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of complex data.”

Palantir played a central role assisting the U.S. military for its operations in the Middle East. It provided a “God’s-eye view” of Afghanistan and a data processing backbone for U.S. intelligence in Iraq. After building big data analytics systems on the battlefield, it sold its tools back to U.S. police departments, what’s sometimes called the “imperial boomerang.”

On July 14, 2025, Anthropic proudly announced a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to “advance U.S. national security.” Details, while vague, included “Exchanging technical insights, performance data, and operational feedback to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise.”

This forms the backdrop for Anthropic’s recent “resistance” to the Pentagon. But what does that “resistance” entail? The company only stipulated two “restrictions” on the use of its technology by the U.S. military. First, that Anthropic not be used to guide autonomous weapons (meaning, a human must pull the trigger if munitions are fired). And second, that Anthropic not be used for the mass surveillance of Americans. The rest of the world is, apparently, fair game.

In reality, Anthropic openly embraces U.S. militarism and American supremacy. It has no problem with the well-documented history of U.S. war crimes, the devastation to populations throughout the world and the crimes of its military allies, such as Israel, receiving its advanced weaponry.

This helps explain why Anthropic’s AI is now being used for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” in Iran. The company “was a step ahead of its rivals,” such as Google, OpenAI and xAI, “thanks to its partnership with Palantir,” the press reported.

While this controversy unfolded, Anthropic also dropped its promise to keep a high bar on general safety measures. According to this provision, the Responsible Scaling Policy, Anthropic would refrain from training an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that its safety measures were adequate. The AI giant decided to remove this restriction because it would disadvantage them against competitors like OpenAI.

U.S. economic domination goes hand-in-hand with war

There is another theme on which the left is near-universally silent: the economic dominance of the United States in the global economy. The tech pseudo-left has, at times, been vocal about Big Tech services provided to the U.S. military. This dates back to protests at Google in 2017 against its development of drone analytics for the military via Project Maven. Yet this ignores the fact that American economic supremacy goes hand-in-hand with war. In the aftermath of World War II, elite policy planners wrote that the U.S. owns about half the world’s wealth, but only houses 6.3% of the world’s population, a disparity which “cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.” The goal was to “maintain this position of disparity,” a task that required dispensing with “the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

To ignore Anthropic’s role in “maintaining this disparity,” with its $380 billion market cap and CEO worth $7 billion, is to pretend that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Wars waged by the United States and its allies are largely a violent means to preserve the economic “disparity” between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Under this neo-colonial arrangement, the Global South is to fulfill its role as supplier of raw materials and cheap labor, while the U.S. monopolizes the most lucrative parts of the global economy, with Big Tech at the helm. In other words, the American war machine is unleashed on societies in order to maintain the globally unequal exchange and division of labor.

Anthropic offers no objections to a global status quo where the United States, which now has 4% of the world’s population, one third of the wealth, and almost half the financial assets, continues to exploit the poor people of the world. Rather, it holds that democracies “must work together to ensure AI development strengthens democratic values globally by maintaining technological leadership to protect against authoritarian misuse.” This tracks with the New Cold War ideology of its high-profile CEO, Dario Amodei, a China hawk who pits the “democratic” West against the authoritarian Chinese. In January, Amodei said Trump’s decision to allow the sale of some AI chips to China is akin to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

Just one year prior, following the release of DeepSeek-R1 in 2025, Amodei penned an article calling for export controls on China so that the U.S. and other “democratic nations” can maintain a “unipolar world” where “only the U.S. and its allies” have the cutting edge AI models and “take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.”

If Amodei were even slightly humanitarian in his worldview, he would publicly oppose the flagrant violations of international law, war crimes, genocidal violence of the U.S. and its allies, and sever ties with the military. Instead, the company boasts it is “very proud” to work with the Department of Defense. “Our most important priority right now,” Anthropic stated last week, “is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.”

In other words, Anthropic and its allegedly “ethical” CEO Amodei, are full-throated American supremacists bolstering the U.S. Empire, and its violent wars, at the highest level. The most recent “stand” against the Pentagon is pure theater.

ATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of

color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.

While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.

Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations.

Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.

Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.

According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.

While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”

Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.”

Although it sports a Microsoft insignia on the hood and door, the physical vehicle the company uses to promote MAPP isn’t for sale by Microsoft, and you probably won’t see Microsoft-labeled cars driving around. Rather, Microsoft provides MAPP as a platform through which to transform existing cop cars into IoT surveillance vehicles: “It’s really about being able to take all this data and put it up in the cloud, being able to source that data with their data, and start making relevant information out of it,” said Beckham. Indeed, Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.” According to Beckham, the information collected and stored in the Azure cloud will help officers “identify bad actors” and “let the officers be aware of the environment that is going on around them.” As an example, he said, “We’re hoping with machine learning and AI in the future, we can start pattern matching” with MAPP vehicles providing data to help find “bad actors.”

According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.

While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”

In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft made major contributions to centralized intelligence centers for law enforcement agencies. Around 2009, it began working on a surveillance platform for the NYPD called the Domain Awareness System, or DAS, which was unveiled to the public in 2012. The system was built with leadership from Microsoft along with NYPD officers.

While some details about the DAS have been disclosed to the public, many are still missing. The most comprehensive account to date appeared in a 2017 paper by NYPD officers

The DAS integrates disparate sources of information to perform three core functions: real-time alerting, investigations, and police analytics.

Through the DAS, the NYPD watches the personal movements of the entire city. In its early days, the system ingested information from closed-circuit TV cameras, environmental sensors (to detect radiation and dangerous chemicals), and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. By 2010, it began adding geocoded NYPD records of complaints, arrests, 911 calls, and warrants “to give context to the sensor data.” Thereafter, it added video analytics, automatic pattern recognition, predictive policing, and a mobile app for cops.

By 2016, the system had ingested 2 billion license plate images from ALPR cameras (3 million reads per day, archived for five years), 15 million complaints, more than 33 billion public records, over 9,000 NYPD and privately operated camera feeds, videos from 20,000-plus body cameras, and more. To make sense of it all, analytics algorithms pick out relevant data, including for predictive policing.

The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.

While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.

Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations

Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.

Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.