Weekly Roundup

SKH Roundup: March 2nd 2026

While the military wants unfettered access to AI systems, presumably to ask it if loot boxes are gambling or not.

Endeavorance

02 Mar 2026 — 6 min read

The United States and Israel Launch War on Iran

Over the weekend, the United States and Israel launched a joint war effort against Iran, bombarding major residential zones in an effort to take out top leadership. While the strikes did indeed manage to murder the leader of a foreign nation (already not great!), they also caused hundreds of civilian casualties, perhaps most notably from a missile which struck a girl's elementary school, killing more than 100 schoolchildren.

I'd like to highlight that our military and Israel's military both boast about how great their precision strikes are.

I want to highlight again—since barely a month ago we took out a different country's leader over in Venezuela—that the removal of a brutal, awful dictator who oversees mass death of their own citizens is a good thing. And that can be true while being the outcome of a bad thing. Hundreds have died, hundreds more injured, including US citizens and random people living in surrounding regions who are being hit by missile strikes either from our own assault or from retaliations.

See the original post below, or find my video about the subject on YouTube.

Department of Artificial Defense

It's been a weird week in the world of AI and Government.

Let's set the stage with our players:

The Department of Defense, aka "DoD," headed by Pete Hegseth
Anthropic, an AI company known for their "Claude" model and their slightly stronger stance on AI ethics
OpenAI, an AI company known for "ChatGPT" and a direct competitor to Anthropic

It all started because Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Elon Musk's AI company are all trying to get that sweet sweet defense contracting money. You see, the US government operates by allocating way too much money to the military, then overspending on contracts to help funnel taxpayer money into CEO pockets. They quite literally collect taxes then use them to pay private companies to do government-critical work, creating scenarios where we've got companies like Boeing whose whistleblowers routinely end up dead, yet holding the company responsible would be a national security risk.

Neato!

So anyway, Anthropic has a deal with the DoD where Claude (or other Anthropic products) can be used, but not for purposes of autonomous weaponry or killing logistics. This limitation made Pete "maximum leathality" Hegseth upset, and he responded by threatening Anthropic if they didn't give unrestricted access to Claude, despite that being against the company's stated ethos.

About as directly as government can meddle in private corporate affairs, which should be expected at this point under Republican leadership.

So we've got Anthropic wanting to keep the money flowing from the DoD, but Hegseth threatens to label them a "supply chain risk" if they don't give in to his demands. Such a label would require that any government-aligned entities cannot use Anthropic products; a designation usually reserved for something like a source rooted in an adversarial country. But this time? Nah, it's just Pete Hegseth wanting to use the fancy computer.

Specifically, he wants to use the fancy computer for "mass domestic surveillance" and "fully autonomous weapons," which were two of the major sticking points highlighted by Anthropic.

This move is just to punish the company for not doing what the White House said, and while I loathe to side with a big tech company, they did make the quite salient point that disagreeing with the White House is about as American as it gets.

But why mention OpenAI at the outset? Well, as this was all shaking out, OpenAI was perfectly happy to seemingly meet Hegseth's demands, announcing details about their contract with the DoD (or rather, since they're sucking up, the Department of War, per their post). Their post also discusses the limitations of the contract, though it is sure to reference legal codes and discusses how all "legal usage" is permitted. Turns out it's legal for the feds to do quite a few things, especially when they control what is legal.

I'll end by noting that the Department of Defense still used Anthropic's tech in their attack on Iran after they had already banned working with Anthropic. So, I mean.

Netflix and Paramount's Heated Rivalry

Netflix has backed away from their plans to purchase Warner Bros. after Paramount continued to outbid Netflix for it.

Warner Bros is looking to sell to anyone, but the two main contenders were Netflix and Paramount. Paramount is now headed up by the son of Larry Ellison, a key oligarch in Trump's orbit and king of the massive Oracle tech empire. With Netflix backing out, Paramount has successfully secured a path towards aggregating the likes of CNN and HBO under the same deeply conservative family who oversees CBS, Showtime, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central, and Viacom to name a few.

This is not a done deal yet, as it still has to go through a good bit of regulatory evaluation and a whoooole lot of paperwork. That said, I am expecting it to ultimately go through, barring meaningful intervention from a possible midterm election undermining the admin.

Funnily enough ("funny" here doing quite a bit of lifting), Netflix shareholders got a nice payday out of this whole deal. As a part of backing down, Warner Bros. had to pay Netflix nearly $3 Billion USD. Paramount offered to cover that payment in addition to their outbidding of Netflix in order to get Netflix to back down, essentially giving Netflix shareholders a $3 Billion infusion while also causing the stock to spike in value as investors were relieved to see the deal come to a close.

Draft Kings? Wraith Kings.

The real ones among us remember him as Skeleton King.

Gaming juggernaut and Steam creator Valve Software is being sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James as the state claims that Valve has promoted illegal gambling targeting children and teenagers through "Loot Boxes."

For the non-gamers, Loot Boxes are a… well, gambling. Kinda. It depends on how you look at it.

Loot Boxes are a general concept in games where you get a locked "loot box" and have to purchase a key for it using real world currency. You have a chance to get a random item from a pool of items, usually with some rare and very rare potential items.

Sometimes the actual presentation of the system is different, but typically it goes: get some kind of black box either before or after making a real world money purchase then click a button to pull a slot machine and see what it spits out. Another example would be something like a digital Gashapon.

Now, that's not really gambling by itself. It's more like opening booster packs of a trading card game, though usually the in-game loot isn't even a usable item, but rather an alternate visual style for something in-game.

The problem comes in with item trading between players. Especially if the "keys" to the loot boxes can be traded after buying them with real world money. Suddenly you have a reference point for monetary value and it creates a market for rare items being sold for real cash.

Personally, I've spent years fighting off random scam requests about my Steam account because it happens to have a somewhat high value item in the inventory. It's wild!

As of now, nothing has happened. It's unclear how this'll spin out, and Valve has yet to release a statement. In some other countries such as Belgium and Netherlands, which classify loot boxes as gambling. For Dutch players, Valve made it so you can see what item is in the loot box before opening it, at least for Dota 2. That said, it won't change what the item is, so if you want to try again, you still have to purchase it to see what's next.

We don't have any real regulation around digital assets, let alone digital assets in a sort of pseudo-market within a video game community stewarded by a private company. Should they be banned? Probably not. Should there be solid regulation on the books to prevent predatory behavior? Probably. What will that look like? I dunno, but it'll likely involve sending proof of genitalia to Jeffrey Epstein's vacation email address.