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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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Is this related to the fact that it was Anthropic (at least I think it was them) who took a principled stand against the US gov using their models to automate kill chains and the like?

Yes, but it wasn't principled. It was to get cheap shot at openai and lure the antitrump SV to use Claude when Codex started seriously catching up with them.

This is nonsensical. Anthropic could have avoided signing up to supply the DoD altogether if they wanted to attract anti trump people. And OpenAI could have avoided walking into a pretty obvious trap.

Claude has been crushing GPT for enterprise use for way longer than this case as well

Almost certainly. More conspiratorially, it’s related to the discussions around government investment in OpenAI. But I think it’s punishment beatings.