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Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Tariff on Foreign-Made Films Is on Shaky Legal Ground: ‘How on Earth Are They Going to Enforce This?'
President Trump is on shaky legal ground if he follows through on a plan to impose a 100% tariff on films produced 'in foreign lands.' Experts agree that the pledge is legally dubious and also faces logistical hurdles. 'How on earth are they going to enforce this?' asks Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker. 'The whole thing is a goofball — I can't imagine how they're going to do this in practice.' More from Variety Shares of Disney, Netflix and Other Studios Fall After Trump Threatens 100% Tariff on Movies 'Produced in Foreign Lands' Movie Industry Shocked and Confused After Trump Says He'll Put 100% Tariffs on Films Produced Outside the U.S.: 'This Is Nuts!' Seven Major Questions About Trump's Plan to Tariff Foreign Films Since his tariff spree began in February, Trump has relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives him broad authority to regulate international trade in times of national emergency. But the law includes specific allowances — called the Berman amendments — for the free flow of informational materials, including films. 'The 1994 amendment made crystal clear that the president did not have the power under [IEEPA] to stop the flow of foreign audiovisual media,' says Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor. The issue came up in 2020, when Trump sought to use IEEPA to ban TikTok. A federal judge granted an injunction, finding that the ban violated the Berman amendments. Congress had to pass a separate law explicitly authorizing the TikTok ban. 'There's nothing in the law that allows him to bar movies instead of short videos,' Chander says. The White House has not spelled out the legal authority Trump would use to tariff foreign-made films. Less than 24 hours after announcing the decision in a post on Truth Social, the president was already tempering his tone. The administration has said that 'no final decisions' have been made on the issue, and Trump will hold industry meetings before moving ahead. Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, says that IEEPA is the 'most legally risky path,' due to the Berman amendments. But she says that Trump could seek to impose tariffs on foreign films under Section 301, which is meant to combat unfair trade practices, or Section 232, which allows for tariffs in cases of national security. 'If I were advising him, I think he could do it with 301,' Kilcrease says. 'To me, it's the most clear legal basis.' However, she noted it would take several months of investigation to authorize such tariffs. 'I see a lot of challenges here,' says Marney Cheek, an attorney who specializes in international trade at Covington & Burling. 'This is not a place where we've imposed tariffs in the past, so there's not a clear road map.' In his initial message, Trump alluded to national security concerns, saying foreign-made films pose an issue of 'messaging and propaganda.' But runaway production has been a concern since the 1950s, so it would be hard to cast it as an emergent threat. 'It's pretty far out there to suggest this is a security risk,' says Steven Bank, a law professor at UCLA. 'It'd be hard to imagine it standing up in court on a national security basis.' If Trump moves forward, a movie studio or other injured party could seek an injunction to block the tariffs. Even if they were allowed to go into effect, there are practical questions about what transactions would be affected. Tariffs are typically imposed on goods; films are services, which are transmitted digitally and not through ports of entry. Other countries have placed quotas on importation of Hollywood films, or imposed a ticket tax at theaters on foreign films. Rep. Howard Berman, a Democrat from Los Angeles, was a champion of Hollywood over 15 terms in office. He offered his initial IEEPA amendment in 1988, after the government seized books and magazines from embargoed countries. 'The fact that we disapprove of the government of a particular country ought not to inhibit our dialogue with the people who suffer under those governments,' Berman said at the time. 'We are strongest and most influential when we embody the freedoms to which others aspire.' Best of Variety Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Pentagon is upping its bet on AI. Here's what it means for the military
The Department of Defense is majorly scaling up artificial intelligence in the military in the hopes of faster decision-making in warfare. The Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Unit awarded artificial intelligence giant Scale AI a prototype contract for 'Thunderforge,' the department's flagship program to integrate AI into military planning and operations. 'Thunderforge marks a decisive shift toward AI-powered, data-driven warfare, ensuring that U.S. forces can anticipate and respond to threats with speed and precision,' the Department said in a press release on Wednesday. Although the financials of the contract were not disclosed, CNBC (CMCSA) reported that it was a multi-million dollar deal. Besides Scale AI, the Thunderforge system will also include defense company Anduril's Lattice open software platform, and LLM technology by Microsoft (MSFT). The Department has been working to get AI capabilities into defense operations since 2021, including through the use of autonomous weapons and AI-powered computer vision to identify airstrike targets. But Thunderforge is its first significant step into giving AI a more prominent role in operational decision-making across the military by integrating large language models, dubbed AI agents, in its workflows. AI will be used in military campaign development and resource allocation, wargaming simulations, planning scenarios and proposed courses of action, and strategic assessments. U.S. Central Command's chief tech officer Schuyler Moore told Bloomberg in 2024 that Centcom had experimented with AI recommendation engines in late 2023 and found that it 'frequently fell short' of humans when proposing orders of attack. The Department will first deploy the system within the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), out of Hawaii, and the U.S. European Command (EUCOM), based in Germany, before scaling it across the rest of the eleven combatant commands. Humans will oversee the AI agents, Scale AI shared in a press release on Wednesday, but that has not quelled worries over the technology being deployed in certain fields. 'We all probably suffer from automation bias, which is this idea that we are tempted to and often will accept the recommendation, for example, that a large language model spits out or prediction that one of these systems is making, because we feel as though the system must have more information than we do, and must be processing it and sequencing it and ordering it better than we could,' legal scholar and former associate White House counsel Ashley Deeks told Quartz. What exacerbates the problem even more is that AI systems are like 'black boxes,' according to Deeks, in that it is tough for users to understand how or why it reaches certain conclusions. 'I hope that the Pentagon itself is thinking about how to train people to resist excessive automation bias when their gut and their experience has told them to do 'x' and the system is telling them to do 'y',' Deeks said. Scale AI CEO and founder Alexandr Wang has been praising the merits of AI-assisted warfare for some time now. Wang took out a full page ad in the Washington Post asking President Donald Trump to invest more to 'win the AI war' in January, and then defended his opinion later during a February summit in Qatar, where he said he is concerned that China will use AI to 'leapfrog' the military capacity of 'Western powers.' China has reportedly made AI military power a strategic priority, although some experts believe Beijing still faces significant obstacles in taking full advantage of the technology. A number of militaries around the world have used AI to assist their military operations and identify targets, most notably Israel in its war in Gaza, and by both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
