AI Companies Aren’t Our Masters, Yet

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Trump’s spectacular capture in January of Nicolás Maduro, the Communist dictator of Venezuela, was reportedly assisted by artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, the AI program Claude is used in our military, and in 8 of the 10 largest companies.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made decisions based on multiple scenarios presented by Palantir using Claude. And this was not the first time that the U.S. Army has benefited from this AI tool.

The stunning success of this military operation involved fewer than 200 American troops, of whom 7 were injured, and several of them were visited by President Trump last Friday at Fort Bragg. Three helicopter pilots were badly wounded in their legs by machine gun fire, Trump said, while 83 soldiers defending Maduro were killed, according to Venezuela.

AI company Anthropic licenses Claude under an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that limits how it can be used. In rejection of these limitations, War Secretary Pete Hegseth threatens to eradicate it not just from our military, but from every vendor that sells products and services to our military by labeling Claude a “supply chain risk.”

This is a type of exclusion usually invoked only for foreign adversaries of the United States. But the irritation by Hegseth and the top brass in our military at Anthropic’s restrictions on the use of its product has worsened to the point where this harsh punishment of a complete banishment is being considered.

Just imagine if the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb had placed restrictions on its use by the military. The military should be able to use unrestricted AI to advance our national security as our elected president thinks best.

Anthropic is not the only AI company placing restrictions on the use of its tools. Other AI companies have also attempted to limit the military applications of their programs.

Several competitors to Anthropic, including OpenAI, Google, and xAI, are chomping at the bit to secure a contract with the U.S. Armed Services and may be willing to drop the restrictions Anthropic currently insists on maintaining. But the Trump Administration complains that it would be enormously difficult to eradicate all current uses of Claude, including those by contractors like Palantir, to switch to another AI tool.

Military spokesman Sean Parnell stated, “The Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people.”

Our military’s contract with Anthropic is worth only about $200 million, a mere pittance of Anthropic’s total $14 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic may be concerned about losing more sizable business if its tool becomes associated with military attacks.

The Vatican released a statement a year ago entitled “Antiqua et Nova” which warned that “autonomous weapons systems, which are capable of identifying and striking targets without direct human intervention, are a cause for grave ethical concern. ... No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”

But there is no guarantee that China would play by the rules of Western Civilization. Our military’s AI needs to be advanced enough to defend against China’s AI in a war, while it is reasonable to limit AI to prevent it from making any unsupervised decisions to kill.

Meanwhile, an improved Chinese AI program created a video of a fistfight between actors Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, which looks as realistic as a Hollywood movie. Despite possibly violating the copyrights on the movies with which the AI program was trained, it has gone viral and thrown Hollywood into a tailspin.

The New York Times described this 15-second clip as “more cinematic than anything so far” from AI. “In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases,” commented Rhett Reese, screenwriter of “Deadpool” and other movies.

The instigator of this video fistfight on a rooftop between Pitt and Cruise was the Irishman Ruairi Robinson. He said on X that this was generated by merely “a 2 line prompt in Seedance 2,” which is an AI film-generating tool by the Chinese company ByteDance.

ByteDance is the same Chinese company that developed TikTok, which upended social media platforms in the U.S. with popular short-reel videos.

Suddenly, a flood of potentially copyright-infringing material created by this Chinese AI tool is going viral online, using characters and scenes copied from popular movies. Those who would like to change a movie's ending may be able to do so privately using AI, but posting new endings could violate copyrights.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Freezing Deaths, Garbage Piles in Largest Sanctuary City

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The largest sanctuary city that defies federal immigration laws is the Big Apple in New York. Its newly elected socialist Indian-Ugandan mayor, Zohran Mamdani, just issued his 13th Executive Order, which forbids city agencies from sharing information with federal officials including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), except as may be required by law.

“ICE is more than a rogue agency — it is a manifestation of the abuse of power,” Mamdani pompously declared. New York is currently holding 7,113 criminal illegal aliens for whom detainers have been issued by federal officials to deport them, yet Mamdani is not cooperating to turn these lawbreakers over to ICE.

Mamdani and other big city Democrat mayors are the ones most responsible for the delays in removing the criminals who never should have been here in the first place. Mamdani has prohibited ICE from entering any city property, which includes parking garages, schools, shelters, public spaces, hospitals, and absurdly even vacant lots, unless ICE has a warrant which is difficult to obtain from liberal judges.

The sanctuary policy in New York City is so strict that it prevents the police from sharing information with ICE about illegal aliens who have been arrested. New York City prohibits transferring these criminals into the custody of federal officials.

Last July the Trump Administration sued New York City officials to end their sanctuary city policy, and to enjoin local administrative regulations that interfere with the apprehension and deportation of criminals. But this lawsuit languishes before the Biden-appointed Judge Ramon Reyes in the Eastern District of New York, without a ruling that could then be appealed.

Mamdani is anticipating the arrival of ICE agents similar to the crackdown on illegal aliens that has been occurring in Minneapolis. But rather than cooperate with law enforcement, Mamdani is ramping up his resistance by creating an “Interagency Response Committee” to oppose Trump’s valiant efforts.

This committee will include the city’s chief immigration officer, the first deputy mayor, the city’s chief counsel, and senior operations managers representing all city agencies. Mamdani is commanding several of the agencies, including those overseeing its jails, to conduct an audit of their compliance with the city’s sanctuary policies against cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

“When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities,” DHS stated through a spokesman.

Resisting immigration laws is an odd priority for Mamdani during his first two months in office, when he’s done a terrible job addressing a snowstorm and cold snap. Keeping the streets clean and residents warm should be Mamdani’s focus, rather than obstructing the deportation program on which Trump was elected.

Since January 24, 18 people have been discovered frozen to death outside in New York City. Last December, its former Mayor Eric Adams sharply criticized Mamdani’s plan to be more permissive toward homelessness, and now many homeless people are freezing to death because they are not in shelters.

“They don’t believe there should be any prisons in our city. They don’t believe that you should do encampment enforcement. … They believe in decriminalizing prostitution after all that we’ve done,” Adams said in his rebuke of Mamdani and his agenda.

Mamdani’s plan has been to allow scores of homeless people to camp out on the streets in New York City. “I went and visited those camps — stale food, human waste, drug paraphernalia, schizophrenic behavior,” Adams observed.

Mamdani’s most recent response has been to arrange for heating buses to be placed in various locations in the city, but people are reportedly having a hard time finding them. Often, they are not where people expect them to be.

Meanwhile, huge piles of garbage have been stacking up uncollected for weeks on New York City streets. Television news programs have posted videos of mountains of garbage-filled bags, along with interviews of residents outraged at how the city officials have failed to do their job of removing trash that is blocking sidewalks and attracting rats.

A heating crisis caused a record-breaking 80,000 New Yorkers to place emergency calls to 311 in January due to a lack of residential heat and hot water. As sub-zero temperatures descended on the Big Apple — whatever happened to global warming? — many were nearly frozen in their apartments because of these energy failures.

Across the country in California, there is some good news as a federal judge struck down Gov. Newsom’s law requiring ICE agents to work without masks that protect them against retaliation. The judge pointed out that this law unfairly targeted federal agents, and that it was unconstitutional because it did not also apply to California officials.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Patriots Should Avoid the Anti-ICE Super Bowl

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

NFL leadership has sided against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), by promoting the Puerto Rican rapper who ranted against ICE on national television Sunday. Bad Bunny declared at the Grammy Awards, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE OUT.”

The ICE OUT slogan was developed by a coalition of Leftist groups, including the ACLU, to resist the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Nearly every artist at the Grammy ceremony except Trump-supporting Nikki Minaj wore a pin with those words.

The following day Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the taxpayer-subsidized NFL, defended his bad choice by absurdly praising Bad Bunny as “one of the greatest artists in the world.” He’s featuring Bad Bunny at the halftime show during the Super Bowl, and claiming that the offensive performer “will use his platform to unite people.”

It doesn’t “unite people” for the NFL to impose a strident “ICE OUT” advocate on more than 100 million Americans watching the Super Bowl. Trump is one of many who have criticized this selection of a Spanish-speaking, Trump-hating entertainer from Puerto Rico.

The New England Patriots are once again playing in this year’s Super Bowl, but patriotic Americans shouldn’t support the NFL while it features opponents of our own law enforcement agencies. Our economy would save an estimated $5 billion if everyone tuned out, because an estimated 39 million Americans will miss or be late for their jobs the following Monday after watching the annual extravaganza.

Taxpayers are also subsidizing Minnesota schools that are training agitators against ICE, and providing them with anti-ICE resistance manuals. A “De-Arrest Primer” is being distributed to instruct Leftists how to physically interfere with ICE as they try to arrest illegal aliens.

The liberal media have identified two Hispanic men, a Border Patrol agent and an officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as those who fired their guns at Alex Pretti, after he was discovered to be carrying a handgun while scuffling with officers. These officers have many years of law enforcement experience, in doing a dangerous job to protect our country.

Video of the scene shows that an agent found a handgun in Pretti’s possession and alerted others. As the agent took the handgun away from Pretti during a struggle, an initial shot rang out, perhaps from a misfire, and then two agents acted swiftly to protect the lives of their colleagues and bystanders.

A liberal narrative of this law enforcement response to an armed man scuffling with officers has gone unrebutted for too long. If DOJ is doing an investigation, then it needs to exonerate the agents soon before everyone believes propaganda from the Left.

Let’s not forget that it was two heroic Border Patrol agents who risked their lives to confront the shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman had just killed 19 children and two teachers. For 77 minutes no policeman confronted the gunman who had barricaded himself in a classroom, but two off-duty Border Patrol agents arrived and entered the school while risking their own lives.

Gunfire sprayed upon them, with one bullet ripping through the baseball cap on one of the agent’s heads. Undeterred, the Border Patrol agents quickly killed the shooter before he could cause further bloodshed.

Someone who brings a gun to a fight with police is taking a risk of being shot. The gun could misfire, which would trigger gunfire at the suspect, or simply learning of the gun could create a reasonable fear by an officer trained to protect himself and others from the gunman.

With the publicizing of the names of the federal agents by the media, Leftists in charge of Minneapolis may be planning to bring murder charges against them. Such a charge could lead to a conflict between state and federal authority that has not been seen since the Civil War.

Federal courts have the authority to block a state prosecution, but have only done so a handful of times in American history. A federal court can also order the release of someone being held in a state prison while awaiting a trial in state court.

Liberal states are already refusing to extradite criminal defendants accused of providing a telemedicine abortion where it is prohibited by state law. Conservative governors could take a similar path by shielding ICE agents from prosecution by the Leftist mob in Minnesota.

ICE and the Border Patrol cannot do their jobs to protect Americans against illegal aliens if rogue prosecutors in Minnesota are allowed to prosecute federal agents who defend themselves against agitators who harass and impede them. Congress should reaffirm the immunity of federal agents from any state prosecutions based on the use of force to put down the resistance.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.