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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Then don't use it, that's the whole point of a free market. Same for the DoW, I have no problem with them not using Anthropic (and from everything I've seen Anthropic was perfectly willing to let DoW unilaterally end the contract early and offered support for a transition period to a new vendor), the retaliation is just excessive, capricious, and completely outside the intent of the law in use (I suppose par for the course for Trump 2.0 admin).

Arguably, though, Anthropic's ethical stance is partly why they are the best, so I'm not sure this is so easily separable. Certainly it has been key to their recruiting and how they have been able to attract the talent they have and they are by far in the lead in model interpretability thanks to this focus. They have also argued in various papers that this approach has led to better model performance (most obviously in false refusals, which will be a thing until we decide we're ok with commercial models teaching people how to make chemical weapons, etc.).