Larry Ellison says AI will watch your every move

Walking down a suburban street already feels like walking through a digital panopticon of video doorbells. If Oracle founder Larry Ellison has his way, that is only day one.

Speaking to investors at Oracle's financial analysts meeting, the company's chairman and CTO shared an aggressive vision for the future of law enforcement, predicting that artificial intelligence will eventually monitor virtually every human movement.

Constant cameras and chasing drones

Ellison laid out a scenario where AI tools ingest a continuous stream of footage from public security cameras, police body cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams.

Under this system, Ellison argued that law enforcement itself would be tightly managed. He stated that every police officer will be supervised at all times, with AI automatically flagging problems to supervisors. In turn, Ellison claimed citizens will be on their best behavior because everything is constantly recorded and analyzed.

He also expects autonomous drones to render high-speed police car chases obsolete. In the era of autonomous drones, Ellison noted, authorities can simply dispatch a drone to shadow a fleeing vehicle rather than risking road pursuits.

Oracle is actively chasing major AI infrastructure contracts to bolster its growth, including existing work with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Ellison currently ranks as the world's sixth-richest individual with a net worth of roughly $157 billion.

The reality check on automated policing

While Ellison framed continuous monitoring as an obvious win for crime reduction, historical data tells a much more complicated story.

As critics and legal observers have pointed out, historical policing data in the United States carries well-documented racial and socioeconomic biases. Training predictive algorithms on past arrest figures often leads systems to disproportionately target minority neighborhoods, creating self-fulfilling surveillance feedback loops.

The risks are far from theoretical. Back in 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its predictive policing initiative after an internal audit revealed the program subjected Black and Latino communities to disproportionate levels of surveillance.

Why it matters

We think Ellison's remarks pull back the curtain on how enterprise cloud giants view the next big revenue frontier. Beyond commercial chatbots and code assistants, public safety and government surveillance represent a massive, lucrative market for high-volume video processing and storage.

Pitching this as a tool that watches both the police and the public is a clever sales argument. However, blurring the line between private consumer hardware—like doorbell and dash cameras—and state surveillance networks raises profound civil liberty concerns that technology alone cannot resolve.

Until AI vendors can demonstrate that automated surveillance does not simply automate existing systemic biases, grand visions of algorithmically enforced good behavior will likely remain more troubling than reassuring.