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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The DoD not wanting to buy a product they can't control is perfectly reasonable.

Agreed, and if I ran the DoD, I'd take a similar stance, even if there were no immediate plans to do those things.

The DoD not wanting such products used in their supply chain is understandable as well -- more so for AI than for many other things.

Also somewhat agreed, but it depends on the scope. Palantir using a supplier with noxious terms to make decisions during wartime? Yeah, that seems inappropriate. Coders using it to write missile firmware code? That seems fine.

The DoD wanting no one who uses Anthropic to also deal with them is not reasonable

This is where 99% of my anger is coming from. It's a wild, CPC-style overreach, which goes far beyond a supply chain risk designation. Hopefully it's just bluster and TACO.

Also somewhat agreed, but it depends on the scope. Palantir using a supplier with noxious terms to make decisions during wartime? Yeah, that seems inappropriate. Coders using it to write missile firmware code? That seems fine.

If Claude is an autonomous and untrustworthy agent, using it to write missile firmware code is not reasonable. I don't think AI is actually yet at the point where it could figure out it was writing code for missiles and subtly sabotage it, but I'm fairly sure the AI companies would love them to be that capable (if not to actually do it), so I can understand the Pentagon's objection.