Programmer Humor

Trump eats hamburgers. Hamburgers are fascist.

I don't mean to start a full argument since I sense we have quite different views, but maybe you could tell me where I go wrong here. Say for the argument the entire Trump admin is fascist. I think there are still many places to break the chain of fascism before you get to anthropics models. (I use this definition of fascism). I think:

1. Primary purpose of the DoD is to defend the US and allies against actual invasions of actual land, everything else is just stupid shit the political system allows for and incentivizes. I don't think this primary purpose, setting aside BS random wars, is fascist so I don't think the organization is fascist either.
2. I'm not certain that contractors of the DoD, which is not inherently fascist but which is for the argument said to be controlled at the top by fascists, become members of the ideology or heavily associated with it when they take contracts, or when they later live up to those contracts. You claim "when a private sector company provides services to a government that is obtusely fascist, it itself becomes a tool in which fascist power is concentrated.". I think this is far too general and strong to be true. Is the department of agriculture a tool where fascist power is concentrated? Is a farmer who cooperates with the USDA a tool where fascist power is concentrated? Is the corn they produce also that, as an analogy to the LLM? The DoD facilitates a lot of horrible stuff, but do the reach of the assumed fascist Trump admin only goes as far as they can order changes within the DoD and within the DoD's contracted corporations, it doesn't spread like fire does.
3. Anthropic has quite a lot of transparency with what "values" they try to get their models to espouse, and the models are generally politically neutral. Regarding your claim that "when a private sector company provides services to a government that is obtusely fascist, it itself becomes a tool in which fascist power is concentrated": it's an entirely different thing to be a tool of fascism than to be fascist. Anthropic being a tool in which fascist power is concentrated doesn't give me any reason that said fascism would "spread" (however such a thing could even happen) to their models.

So in my view the chain between Trump Admin->DoD->Anthropic->Claude Sonnet 4.6, and in the opposite direction, is pretty weak and not enough that I would call the model fascist. I think this is especially true now that the use of the model is being phased out (?). That's in the "readily espouses or promotes views connected to fascism" and in the "any usage is directly funding fascist organizations in a major way" senses I feel that a model could be described as fascist (or AI in general could be).

To analogize again, I don't think a Bernie supporter working in the DoD is automatically a fascist and certainly don't think that purchasing an old TV from them is supporting fascism (or that the TV is fascist, even if they had previously used it in their office at the DoD).

The book thing I'm not sure how you connect to fascism? It might be ultra-bad, it might be copyright infringement, but it doesn't feel like fascism to me beyond surface level comparisons to book burning.

You know that Intel and AMD both grew up on government contracts, specifically military ones? Sure hope you don't use Intel or AMD.

This is just capitalism. As profits fall due to competition between capitalists they seek new ways to profit. Monopolization, intensified exploitation, enshittification are one way to deal with this problem. However, if those aren’t working capitalists will try to fuse themselves to the state. They use state violence to pursue profits through hyperexploitation and imperialism. That’s what we call fascism. It’s not distinct from capitalism, just an extension of it.

AI companies are no different than any of the other companies that preceded it. They are so over leveraged it’s unlikely they can survive in the long run without the state. Thats why they are comfortable working with fascists. We could have computer scientists creating similar models that actually benefit humanity but it’s not going to happen under capitalism.

I think you are just referring to capitalism.