Day: November 2, 2025

• AI-generated content is increasingly widespread in politics.
• It’s raising concerns among lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
• “When I’m on my feed today, I’m scared to death,” Sen. Chris Murphy told BI.

If you’re worried about the growing use of hyperrealistic AI-generated content in politics, you’re not alone. Some politicians feel the same way.

“When I’m on my feed today, I’m scared to death,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told BI. “I have no idea what’s real and what’s not, and I don’t understand how we have a meaningful political dialogue in this country when there is no way for voters to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.”

Everywhere you look online, politicians and political groups are using AI to make a point.

Most recently, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video in which the president is depicted dumping a brown substance widely assumed to be feces onto protestors out of a fighter jet.

“I think it was mud,” Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming told BI. “But maybe not.”

But while Trump and his administration are some of the more consistent distributors of AI-generated content, some Democrats are using AI too.

In the New York City mayoral race, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has posted several AI-generated videos on X attacking Zohran Mamdani, while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s X page is also filled with over-the-top AI-generated images, many of them mocking Trump and other Republicans.

Even Trump himself has said he thinks the proliferation of AI-generated content online is “a little bit scary, to be honest with you.”

“President Trump is the greatest communicator in American history,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told BI in a statement for this story. “No leader has used social media to communicate directly with the American people more creatively and effectively than President Trump.”

Lawmakers say that as long as those AI-generated videos and images are clearly recognizable as parodies, it’s not a huge deal. But in some cases, it’s not as clear.

“I think it’s a shocking message he was sending to the American people by reposting that, and it’s ridiculous that he did that,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona told BI, referring to Trump’s fighter jet video. “But what I’m concerned about are those videos where you can’t tell.”

One recent example: Senate Republicans’ campaign arm posted an AI-generated video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declaring that “every day gets better for us” amid the ongoing government shutdown.

It was a real quote, said during an interview with Punchbowl News. But the video, which included a small, transparent disclaimer in the bottom right corner, was not.

“These were Chuck Schumer’s own words celebrating the shutdown he has voted for 13 times and the real-world consequences impacting American families,” said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which produced the video. “He may wish people didn’t know he said them, but he did — and for $0 our video took a print quote seen by ‘100,000+’ Punchbowl subscribers to over 1.8 million views.”

“I think it’s worrisome. I think it’s something we’re gonna need to think through really hard,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told BI, referring to the general spread of AI-generated political content. “Otherwise, everything you see on TV is gonna be fake.”

‘Regulation of AI is really hard’

Not everyone is worried about AI-generated content. Lummis, who said she was the subject of a parody when she first ran for the office for the first time in 1978, says we’re simply seeing a technologically advanced version of a long-standing practice.

“It’s more sophisticated, just the way movies are more sophisticated than even the original Star Wars movie,” Lummis said. “But it’s not new.”

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee who’s positioned himself as an ally of the burgeoning AI industry, says he doesn’t see the need for specific regulation around political deepfakes.

“I think the protections on free speech are at their height when it concerns political speech,” Cruz told BI, saying that “existing laws concerning fraud” can address the issue. “We need to make sure we’re protecting against real harms, but at the same time, not strangling the development of AI in the cradle.”

Cruz specifically praised Cuomo’s use of AI-generated content to attack Mamdani in the NYC mayoral race, saying that it’s “really effective” even though “nobody on earth” would think that it’s the real Mamdani appearing in the videos.

Even among those who want to see something done, there’s no easy answer available, given free speech protections.

“Regulation of AI is really hard, admittedly,” Murphy said. The Connecticut senator said he was open to trying to ban fake political content “or at the very least requiring clear, indelible watermarks” on AI-generated content.

Hawley is one of several cosponsors of a bill called the “Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act,” which would ban the use of deceptive AI-generated material for the use of influencing elections or raising campaign cash.

“To the extent we can as allowed by the First Amendment, I think we ought to prohibit most of the AI-generated totally fake stuff on TV in elections when it’s meant to influence the outcome of an election,” Hawley said.

For Kelly, the use of AI by American political campaigns is just the beginning of his concerns.

“We need to figure out, how do we make sure that this technology isn’t used against us by our adversaries,” Kelly said. “Forget about how political opponents could use it.”

• The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday over Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs.
• Trump says a national emergency lets him issue sweeping tariffs — which no other president has done.
• Experts say Trump could still pull off his trade plans without them, but it’ll be harder.

In April, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency. The United States, he said, had “been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered” by other countries through trade deficits.

Imposing a tariff of at least 10% on nearly every single country in the world would address the problem, Trump said. Select countries, like Brazil and India, would be subjected to even higher tariffs, which are taxes imposed on imported goods.

It was “Liberation Day,” Trump announced.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments over whether those tariffs can stand.

If the Supreme Court kicks Trump’s tariffs to the curb, it’ll be taking away one of the most powerful and flexible tools the president has used to pursue his economic agenda. If it lets Trump keep them, it’ll reflect the Supreme Court’s ever-broadening view of presidential power.

To legally justify the “Liberation Day” taxes on American importers, the White House leaned on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The Carter-era law allows presidents to limit international transactions after declaring a national emergency, and has typically been used to justify sanctions.

The Supreme Court is considering whether the IEEPA allows presidents to impose tariffs, a power no previous president has ever claimed. If the court decides yes, it’ll take up a second issue: Whether giving the president this power tramples upon Article I of the Constitution, which says it’s Congress’s job to set and collect taxes and duties.

Those questions give the justices room to choose their own adventure in how they approach the case, according to Rachel Brewster, a professor of international trade at Duke Law School.

If they zero in on the text of the IEEPA, they might be more inclined to uphold the decisions of lower courts, which found the tariffs illegal, she said. If their questions center on national security, things could swing in Trump’s favor, according to Brewster.

“There’s multiple frames,” Brewster told Business Insider. “It’s a mix of all these things — it’s a mix of domestic taxation, it’s a mix of domestic regulation, but it also implicates foreign imports and foreign negotiation. So I think there’s a lot of wiggle room.”

No taxation without justification

IEEPA doesn’t say anything about letting presidents invent new taxes or tariffs in response to national emergencies. Instead, the law allows presidents to “regulate” importation, which the Trump administration says covers the power to unilaterally impose tariffs.

Attorneys opposing the IEPPA tariffs have argued that Congress has passed plenty of other laws that, under certain circumstances, allow presidents to impose tariffs without explicit congressional permission. Legislators could have included that power in IEEPA if they wanted to, they say.

Trump has taken the unprecedented measure of using this novel power as the basis for one of his biggest economic priorities, said Alan Wolff, a former deputy director of the World Trade Organization, who has negotiated trade deals in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Wolff told Business Insider. “No president has ever done anything like this.”

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, it would apply only to the “reciprocal” tariffs announced on “liberation day” and the “trafficking” tariffs Trump issued earlier on imports from China, Canada, and Mexico, which he said were meant to stem what the White House described as a tide of foreign-made fentanyl into the United States.

Those IEEPA-justified tariffs, if they are upheld, would raise four times as much revenue as the other Trump tariffs combined, according to an estimate from the Tax Foundation, a think tank.

The Supreme Court’s November 5 hearing will address two different tariff cases, both brought by groups of small businesses, as well as twelve states that oppose the tariffs. Victor Schwartz, the founder of VOS Selections, a New York-based wine importer that is the lead plaintiff in one case, previously told Business Insider that he’s suing because bigger companies wouldn’t take on the challenge.

“One of the big motivating factors for me to step up is that the big guys in business were not getting involved,” Schwartz said. “The big guys who have the money and power are cowering or defending their own self-interest.”

Tariffs are a Trump administration priority

Courts are typically loath to second-guess presidents on national security issues. And for that reason, it’s likely the Supreme Court will uphold the tariffs, said Wolff, now a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“I think that it’s very tough for the Supreme Court of the United States to say the foreign economic policy of the United States, which is based on this statute of this 1977 law — we’re going to determine that actually the President had no authority to do this,” Wolff said.

Neither the Court of International Trade nor the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit disagreed that Trump had the ability to determine emergencies. But both said that the tariff powers Trump claimed just aren’t in the IEEPA toolkit.

“They just said, even if there has been a finding of an emergency, IEEPA doesn’t authorize this,” Brewster said.

If the Supreme Court knocks down the IEEPA tariffs, Trump could still accomplish his trade policies, but it would be “a lot messier and more difficult,” Wolff said.

The laws that explicitly grant Trump the ability to issue tariffs without Congress’s permission are much less flexible than the powers Trump claimed under IEEPA.

Those tariffs can only be imposed against specific countries or particular industries, and they typically have built-in expiration dates and caps on how high the tariff can be. Some of them also require investigations by government agencies, which could further slow things down.

“For IEEPA, we need none of that,” Brewster said. “We don’t need any investigation. We don’t need any substantive limits. You just have this completely unbound power in IEEPA, which is why the president is now so fond of IEEPA.”

• Ibrahim Shah applied for his dream job at Anduril. He made it two rounds before being rejected.
• “I was anticipating really hard questions, and that’s pretty much all I was thinking about,” Shah told Business Insider.
• Shah said that he learned it’s “better to be nervous and authentic than to pretend like you have composure.”

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ibrahim Shah, a 22-year-old student studying computer science at the University of California, Irvine. It’s been edited for length and clarity. An Anduril spokesperson pointed Business Insider to cofounder Matt Grimm’s response on social media.

My dream is to build my own company. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus when he was only 21. I wanted to be at an organization where the founders are absolute killers, very technically gifted, and have bold personalities.

If I work at a company like Anduril, that means I’m super smart, and I also get to be in a culture that incentivizes taking bold bets, which would help me in my future as a founder.

I was applying for an early-career software engineering role. I went through phone screen and then had an interview, which consisted of a behavioral portion for the first half as well as a technical.

The phone screen went stellar. It was very casual. He asked me why I wanted to actually work at Anduril. I emphasized my desire to work at a company that has real impact, where we’re working with the US government and allies and saving lives.

After that, I had my first-round technical scheduled. I was very confident going in. I studied probably 80 coding questions for the past few weeks leading up to this.

The interviewer was pretty calm. However, while he was speaking to me, I was anticipating these technicals that were coming up, which are notoriously difficult at Anduril. I tried to calm myself down, which led to me sounding aloof and uninterested.

My tone of voice was not super bright and as emotive as it usually is. In the initial recruiter screen, I was super bright and happy and excited because I really wanted this opportunity, but I didn’t have the idea of a technical assessment clouding my mind.

I was anticipating really hard questions, and that’s pretty much all I was thinking about. If you were being interviewed for a role where you’re going to make life-changing money that would change the trajectory of your family, and it’s based off of whether you could solve some math and coding problems, that would probably make you a little nervous.

After the first recruiter phone screen, I could tell he really wanted me to get this role. When I read that text, you can see the disappointment in his words. My first reaction was: “Wow, this recruiter is amazing and actually took time to create real feedback for me.”

My other reaction was: “Oh my god, I can’t believe I ruined a life-changing opportunity for myself because I messed up the behavioral portion.” I felt very mad at myself.

My main takeaway is that it’s better to be nervous and authentic than to pretend like you have composure. Trying to manufacture a calm aura can take away from how you truly feel about a company.

In the future, I’ll completely compartmentalize my brain so I don’t think about what’s coming next. When the technical portion comes, then sure, I can become calm and aloof, because that does help me perform better and overthink less.

I initially posted it as a throwaway post, expecting to maybe receive a few comments from friends in the tech industry who would support me. It really blew up.

It seems like everybody is trying to interview me now, which is amazing. Perplexity has reached out and is interviewing me. Thinking Machines is also interviewing me. A myriad of other defense startups as well.

This is an amazing outcome.