They definitely do: at least openAi "allegedly" has whole teams scanning socials, forums, etc for embarrassments to monkey-patch.

They should make Opus Extended Extended that routes it to actual person in a low cost country.

Yes, you're the only one.

Of course they are.

No doubt about it, and there's no reason to suspect this can only ever apply to embarassing minor queries, either.

Even beyond model alignment, it's not difficult to envision such capabilities being used for censorship, information operations, etc.

Every major inference provider more or less explicitly states in their consumer ToS that they comply with government orders and even share information with intelligence agencies.

Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc are all one national security letter and gag order away from telling you that no, the president is not in the Epstein files.

Remember, the NSA already engaged in an unconstitutional criminal conspiracy (as ruled by a federal judge) to illegally conduct mass surveillance on the entire country, lie about it to the American people, and lie about it to congress. The same organization that used your tax money to bribe RSA Security to standardize usage of a backdoored CSPRNG in what at the time was a widely used cryptographic library. What's the harm in a little bit of minor political censorship compared to the unconstitutional treason these predators are usually up to?

That's who these inference providers contractually disclose their absolute fealty to.