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.

The problem, Baker argued, is twofold. Artificial intelligence companies need to ingest massive amounts of data to train their L.L.M.s—a voracious hunger that has compelled a few of them, like Anthropic, to allegedly cut some corners when it comes to securing copyrights. But China, our ostensible rival for A.I. world domination, isn’t limited by those kinds of pesky legal concerns. To fight back, Baker wrote, Donald Trump should invoke the Defense Production Act, a Cold War–era law, to compel Disney and other content owners to license their catalogs to Washington on “reasonable” terms. “This is the only expeditious way out of the current mess,” he declared.

It’s sort of hard to imagine that OpenAI or Anthropic really need access to Hollywood I.P. to achieve superintelligence before the Chinese. Nonetheless, he’ll likely get a warm reception from the likes of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, A.I. czar David Sacks, and other Silicon Valley heavyweights who have been prodding the administration to bless A.I. training as “fair use.” Trump stopped just shy of doing so in his so-called A.I. Action Plan, but it’s easy to imagine that each courtroom win by Hollywood and the media companies will trigger a fresh lobbying surge on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Naturally, one wonders how far Trump might go if his tech allies keep asking him to push the envelope. I recently noted the president’s attempted power grab at the Copyright Office, and speculated that his team might try to rewrite registration rules—perhaps extracting royalties for Washington whenever Hollywood sought to protect any film or show produced with the help of A.I., similar to the kickback he demanded from Nvidia for selling its chips to China. That gambit may be less likely now that Shira Perlmutter’s firing as register of copyrights has been put on ice, thanks to an appeals court ruling last week. But those machinations reveal how Trump and his aides are thinking. No lever of power is off limits—not even declaring a national emergency to let Elon Musk upload Mickey Mouse onto Grok.

While it’s true that presidents from both parties have stretched the Defense Production Act—accessing rare earth minerals, telecom software, meat and poultry production during the pandemic, etcetera—Baker is effectively proposing that the nation conscript Disney characters, Stephen King novels, and Taylor Swift songs to ensure our models reign supreme. But does American technological hegemony really hinge on the ability to train models on Paw Patrol data? No job is too big, no pup is too small… but my guess is still no.

Look, even if you take Baker seriously, the flaw in his argument is evident in his selective reading of the case law. The Anthropic settlement that provoked him was a legal unicorn, shaped by the company’s admitted use of a pirated library. And the other big decisions aren’t really indicative of where everything is going either. Kadrey v. Meta went Mark Zuckerberg’s way, but might have swung differently with sharper lawyering. And in Thomson Reuters’s copyright infringement suit against Ross Intelligence—also for allegedly using copyrighted material to train its A.I. models—the judge first ruled one way, then essentially threw up her hands, leaving the matter for appeal.

Baker sighs that we’re a long way out from anything resembling consensus. That was always the point. Fair use is fact-specific; a court might deny it to a consumer A.I. model, and grant it to the Pentagon in the name of national defense. And even if the next three dozen A.I. cases all break for copyright holders, nothing prevents the one after that from turning out differently. Besides, Disney, WBD, and Universal can always go on the legal attack against Chinese A.I., as they did today in a new lawsuit against MiniMax.

Meanwhile, by my count, the docket of A.I. lawsuits has swelled past 50. Yet the A.I. companies continue to raise obscene sums at equally obscene valuations—profits optional. So why imagine that a single administration, even an emboldened one, can declare a national emergency, seize Marvel characters and other linchpins of this country’s multitrillion-dollar intellectual property economy, and somehow end the litigation? It’s a fantasy. The day Trump tries to commandeer Spider-Man for his A.I. pals is the day the government is slapped with a Fifth Amendment takings claim. Because if America excels at anything, it isn’t espionage—it’s lawyering.

Thanks, Eriq. I’ll see everyone on Thursday.

Matt