If you are in any way involved in this project, please remember you may end up with the blood of millions of people on your hands. You will erode the moral inhibitions people in San Francisco have against building this sort of thing, and eventually SF will ship the best surveillance tools to dictators worldwide.
This is not hyperbole, this sort of thing has already happened. Zuckerberg basically ignored the genocide in Myanmar which his app enabled because maintaining his image of political neutrality is more important to him. Saudi Arabia has already executed people for social media posts found using tools written by western software developers.
Sure, xrisk may be more important than genocide, but please remember you will need to sleep at night knowing what you’ve done and you may not have any motivation to work on xrisk after this.
NSA building it is arguably better because atleast they won’t sell it to countries like Saudi Arabia, and they have better ability to prevent people quitting or diffusing knowledge and code to companies outside.
Also most people in SF agree working for the NSA is morally grey at best, and Anthropic won’t be telling everyone this is morally okay.