"It is all just for your safety." and other excuses.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is viable by Anthropic to do so, it is a business decision. Nevertheless the reasons sound contrived and mask the demand for such a lucrative business opportunity, if you abstract it away from activists.

This is not about moral, only about reality.

Maybe Anthropic had a nice chat with the administration and/or think, that this was something, that interests them on a psychological level: predicting human behavior.

Look at Muse from Meta: Meta is doing exactly the same I bet, to optimize their ad business.

Anthropic will sooner or later feature ads, and maybe this is a way to distract from this usage possibility.

Remember, the "No! We don't work with the government, we want privacy for our customers." mantra won't match with "We need to make money and surveillance of our customers would be helpful as well as a cool topic for our engineers to work on."

Anthropic itself will be yet another normal Big Tech company, all, even those who boasted "Don't be evil" or encrypt like hell their smartphones allegedly made good bucks in China.

It is ok, no problem with that by Anthropic just with their hypocrisy in my point of view.