Two royals who produce nothing and were elected by nobody are demanding Big Tech crack down on AI tools and take aim at Elon Musk's xAI — and they want American speech rights trimmed to get it done.
Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan issued a scathing statement on their official website titled "Can we all agree technology should not enable predators to target children?" — a framing that buries the real stakes: who decides what speech is permitted online, and whether foreign elites with no democratic mandate get a say.
The Sussexes praised Minnesota's new law outlawing AI "nudification" technology, which passed the state Senate 65-0 and is the first ban of its kind nationwide. They called it "an example of leadership fit for the digital age: a bi-partisan decision to stop technology from enabling predatory behavior disproportionately targeting women and children."
Then they swung at Musk — without naming him. The couple slammed "the trillionaire leader of the tech company responsible for X's Grok" for suing Minnesota to "stop the law from going into place."
Musk's xAI filed suit last week, arguing the state has the right to block AI from creating sexualized content but that the law "extends far beyond that goal" and potentially violates freedom of speech. A federal judge denied xAI's request to block the law on July 31, though a hearing on a preliminary injunction is set for Aug. 19.
Harry and Meghan accused the company of "mitigating risk to their bottom line instead of aggressively responding to the clear evidence their product features are enabling predators to prey on women and children."
Grok's "Imagine" feature has drawn scrutiny for being used to generate sexualized deepfakes without consent — a real problem. But xAI's lawsuit raises a legitimate constitutional question: does Minnesota's ban sweep so broadly that it chills protected speech?
Neither NewsBreak nor USA TODAY pressed that question. Both outlets ran essentially the same wire copy, framing the Sussexes' statement straight and leaving the free-speech concern to a single sentence from xAI's legal complaint.
The Sussexes have spent years pushing for tougher content-moderation policies. In 2024, they said they'd been meeting with families of children harmed by social media. "The best parenting in the world cannot keep children safe from these platforms," they said. At a 2023 New York panel, Meghan said: "People are getting hurt – and people, specifically children, are dying."
Nobody disputes that predators exploit new technology. The question is whether the cure is letting rootless globalist elites — who answer to no American voter — dictate the boundaries of permissible speech.
Minnesota's law may be narrowly tailored or it may be overbroad — that's what the courts will decide. But when two royals who fled the British monarchy's constraints start demanding constraints on American speech, the founders' tavern conversations come to mind. They didn't cross an ocean to trade one set of unelected arbiters for another.