Last week, I stumbled upon one of the more absurd arguments I’ve encountered this year: a Lawfare column by Stewart Baker, the former general counsel for the National Security Agency, essentially proposing that the U.S. government enlist James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Luke Skywalker in the A.I. arms race with China. Baker, a veteran Republican policy hand, was apoplectic that Anthropic, the big A.I. company behind the Claude chatbot, had agreed to shell out $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement class action brought by a group of authors whose books had been pirated to train its large language models. But Baker wasn’t just worried that more litigants would emerge from the woodwork, demanding ever more extravagant payouts. He was worried that the piddling complaints of the entertainment industry could put America’s entire national security at risk.