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Bollywood just surrendered to censorship. Hollywood could be next.
In 2023, the Indian director Honey Trehan was on the verge of a breakthrough. His film Punjab ’95, which told the story of a human rights activist murdered for investigating mass killings of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, had been given a prominent slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trehan was convinced the film would be big; its star, Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh, believed in the project so much that he didn’t even ask for a salary.
Key takeaways
- The recent censorship of the Indian film Satluj has drawn new attention to the way that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attacked free expression in Bollywood.
- Over the course of more than a decade in power, Modi has used a mix of punishment and incentives to push the massive industry away from producing themes that challenge his government — and turned propaganda films into box office successes.
- There’s a lesson here for the United States. Though protections for free speech in Hollywood are far more robust, Trump has made several moves that resemble Modi’s — suggesting that Americans need to be vigilant about protecting free speech here.
But the premiere never happened. According to Trehan, his producer got a threatening call from someone affiliated with the Indian government, saying that if the film screened in Toronto, it would never appear at home. Trehan and his producer agreed, but the approval never came. India’s ratings agency, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), demanded 127 cuts — including cutting the word “Punjab” from a film about the state. If implemented, they would have left the film (in Trehan’s words) as little more than a “trailer.”
After years of court cases and failed wrangling, Trehan and his producer gave up on a theatrical release. They signed an agreement with Zee5, an Indian streaming service, to premiere the film exclusively on their platform in July under the new name Satluj.
But just two days after the film’s release on July 3, Zee5 removed Satluj for Indian viewers at the request of the government, which claimed the film threatened public order and national security. This weekend, it was removed from Zee5’s international service as well, meaning the film was no longer legally accessible anywhere on the planet.
When we spoke on Monday, Trehan was still unsure why the government had gone to such great lengths to suppress his film. He claims to have heard nothing beyond vague public claims about the film threatening public safety and Indian sovereignty. But it’s clear that the events had rocked his faith in his country.
“When all these kinds of things happen,” he says, “you are bound to ask this question to yourself: Are we still living in a democracy?”
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the Indian film industry — which has a cultural footprint that rivals Hollywood and even surpasses it in some regions — has undergone a transformation. Once seen as a bastion of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, the kind of business where Muslims and even Pakistanis could be stars, the Indian film industry has increasingly been remade in its right-wing government’s image. Films that celebrate Hindus and demonize Muslims make up an ever-growing share of industry output; films that take up politically difficult topics, like Satluj, are becoming scarcer.
This is by design. As part of its broader assault on democratic freedoms, the Modi government has taken a series of very visible steps to reward ideologically simpatico filmmakers — and punish dissidents. The industry has gotten the message, and shifted its output accordingly. Those filmmakers willing to speak publicly, like Trehan, describe a widespread climate of self-censorship, painting a portrait of an industry that has chosen compliance over courage.
“There are so many things I want to make and I get told, ‘No one will touch it,’” the Indian director Shruti Ganguly tells me. “Actors who speak out against the government — they don’t get work.”
Understanding how this happened matters to Indians — but not only them. The Trump administration has, in several ways, laid the groundwork for a similar attack on cinematic free speech. While the American version is vastly less developed than what’s happening in India, the subordination of Bollywood has exposed the general means through which a powerful and seemingly liberal entertainment industry can be brought to heel by a determined government.
In today’s America, “you can see an [early stage] of what happened to allow institutions to be captured and politicized” in India, says Sadanand Dhume, an expert on Indian politics at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
The fall of Bollywood
Censorship in Indian film is hardly new. The CBFC, created in 1951, is empowered not just to rate movies but to block their release outright if it finds a film contrary to any of the sweeping categories in Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act: the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency, or morality.
It is a power that certainly had been abused prior to Modi’s premiership. Aman Bhargava, a data scientist based in Bangalore, recently examined data on over 8,000 Indian films censored by the CBFC between its founding and the end of the 20th century. His investigation found extremely high levels of censorship in the board’s first three decades, focusing primarily on depictions of sex and violence. But political censorship was hardly unheard of. During the Emergency, a two-year period from 1975 to 1977 where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed essentially dictatorial powers, censors literally burned the prints of a film satirizing her leadership.
“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck. But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”
Honey Trehan, director
By the 1990s, instances of CBFC censorship had declined dramatically. Modi has not only revived it, but significantly expanded its scope — creating a new censorial regime even worse than what came before. “The past was problematic. The present is worse,” Dhume says.
This judgment is backed by extensive evidence, published in both the Indian and American press, demonstrating the government’s increasingly tight grip over Hindi-language filmmaking.
The most obvious mechanism has been politicization of the CBFC. The current chair — a poet named Prasoon Joshi — is a vocal ally of the prime minister; in a phone call, the Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi described him as a government “stooge.” Trehan, similarly, says the body is working “hand-in-glove” with Modi’s Ministry of Information “to control the narrative” on politically sensitive topics.
Over time, the Modi government has moved to remove checks on its allies’ power. In 2021, it eliminated a decades-old special appellate board that allowed filmmakers to contest CBFC rulings — forcing them instead to go through regular litigation for relief. But India’s justice system is slow and expensive, often an unrealistic option for movies that need to make their budgets back in a timely fashion. Trehan’s Satluj shows how difficult it is to fight the censor, and why so few in Bollywood are willing to do it.
“Over the past decade, the CBFC has become less a certifying body and more an arm of state-sponsored and sentiment-driven censorship,” journalist Saurav Das wrote last year in Frontline, an English-language Indian magazine published by The Hindu newspaper. “With every decision, every inexplicable demand for cuts, and every instance of folded resistance in the face of fringe protests, the Board has revealed what it truly is: a morality police in disguise.”
Nor is the CBFC Modi’s only weapon. “The tax authority,” Dhume says, “is basically completely politicized in India” — and can be wielded against filmmakers and studios who step out of line. So can the police: Five years ago, Indian police arrested the son of Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan on drug charges. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for Khan’s outspokenness on violence against Muslims. Khan’s son was detained for three weeks and released on bail; prosecutors dropped the charges seven months after his arrest, ultimately admitting he never had possessed drugs in the first place.
Modi’s BJP party also has something no prior Indian government possessed: a fervent online cadre that directs waves of threats and harassment at dissident directors, actors, and even film critics. In January 2021, a Muslim supporting actor in an Amazon-hosted streaming show called Tandav — a soapy political drama that took shots at life under the BJP — became deluged by online hate. Angry Modi fans repeatedly reported him to the police for alleged insults to Hinduism; Amazon eventually cut one of his scenes to try and appease the mob.
But the Modi government hasn’t been satisfied with only punishing critical filmmakers. It has also provided ample incentives to studios who wish to make ideological propaganda.
This began with 2022’s The Kashmir Files, a movie about very real killings of Hindus in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir that exaggerated the scope and severity of the situation to demonize Muslims. Widely panned by critics as dishonest shlock, the film received a huge promotional push from the ruling party. Modi personally endorsed it, and at least eight BJP-governed states gave it a special exemption from entertainment taxes to lower ticket prices. BJP states also gave government employees time off from work to go see the film, and even hosted screenings. As a result, it was one of the best-performing movies of the year.
The success of The Kashmir Files showed that there was a real audience for aggressively nationalist films — as makes sense in a country that has elected Modi to the premiership three times, and where he currently enjoys a roughly 70 percent approval rating. As such, it has spawned more sophisticated imitators.
In 2025, a film called Dhurandhar — a slick action movie about an Indian sleeper agent killing his way through mafia and terror networks in Pakistan — dominated the box office, becoming the third-highest grossing Hindi film of all time. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge premiered this year, and is more nakedly propagandistic: Variety’s reviewer wrote that it “practically features Modi as a supporting character through endless news snippets.” It has already surpassed the box office total of its predecessor.
The end result is a kind of profit-minded self-censorship. Increasingly, Indian film studios shy away from financing movies with controversial themes and shovel money at jingoistic fare like Dhurandhar. An 11-month investigation by the Indian publication Article 14 concluded that this has effectively transformed the most prominent sector of the Indian film industry.
“Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry,” Article 14’s Anna M M Vetticad writes.
To be clear: It’s not that critical voices in the film industry have been silenced entirely. Independent-minded films still get made — like 2023’s Jawan and Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan-led action films that The Atlantic described as “littered with subversive commentary on India under Modi.” The environment is markedly freer outside Hindi-language cinema; the Malayam and Tamil film industries have been more resistant to government pressure.
But the Hindi industry is the biggest and most influential: The term “Bollywood” itself generally refers only to Hindi studios. And it’s clear that the balance is off there — leading the government’s anti-Muslim narrative to dominate in one of India’s most important cultural spheres.
“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck,” Trehan says. “But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”
The future of Hollywood?
What Modi has done to Indian film carries clear lessons for other backsliding democracies — most notably, the United States.
The first lesson is that free expression in major industries depends, in large part, on preserving nonpartisan leadership and norms in powerful government agencies.
India’s CBFC, tax agencies, and law enforcement have long had problems, including abusive political interventions. But Modi has made these problems considerably worse, to the point where it is less a change in degree than in kind. Today, key agencies have become staffed by political cronies who act like extensions of ruling parties. This capture of nominally nonpartisan institutions is what enabled him to bring so much political pressure on studios, producers, and actors.
The second lesson is that big cultural industries — whatever their professed political values — are first and foremost profit-seeking entities. Bollywood has a reputation as a more culturally progressive space, even casting Pakistani actors in prominent roles during the early Modi years. But when it became clear that the balance of financial power favored the government, that critical films might never see the light of day and propagandistic ones would make bank, Indian film studios shifted accordingly.
“Movie-making is an expensive business, so you understand where they’re coming from.” Dhume says. One film critic, granted anonymity by Indian journalist Kaashif Hajee, was even blunter: “The only God is the box office.”
We have seen both of these mechanisms at work in the second Trump administration.
President Donald Trump has famously demolished the independence of agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and even tried to weaponize them against its enemies in the entertainment industry — most notably when it tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this year.
That effort failed. But there are also many examples of American conglomerates seeming to bow to government pressure, like CBS’s decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show while its parent company awaited FCC approval for its merger.
There’s even a handful of examples of studios pushing out films nakedly bidding for the president’s favor, like Amazon’s Melania documentary. While that film was a box office dud — it made just $16.7 million on a $75 million budget — it was widely seen as an effort to win favor with the administration on other regulatory matters. Ted Hope, one of the founders of Amazon’s studio arm, called the film “an outright bribe” in an interview with the New York Times.
Overall, however, these cases remain exceptional. There is no evidence that the American entertainment industry is shifting toward MAGA propaganda in any mass way; Trump critical-fare (like the Star Wars series Andor or the superhero satire The Boys) remains vastly more popular with critics and audiences.
This owes partly to structural dissimilarities between the United States and India. The American ratings board has long been far weaker than the CBFC, and the First Amendment is far stronger than India’s constitutional speech protections. We are less than two years into Trump’s second term; Modi has been in power continuously since 2014. It would be very surprising to do in a year and a half what Modi accomplished over a decade.
The lesson of India’s film industry is not, then, that Trump is on the verge of conquering Hollywood. Rather, it’s that he has identified the right mechanisms for pressuring the entertainment industry: using politicized agencies to both raise the costs of free speech and create incentives for companies to toe a state-friendly line.
That these lines of attack are at present underdeveloped in the United States does not mean they could not, eventually, become something more serious. Any effort to future-proof American democracy, to safeguard its foundations from further assault, requires serious study of how these tactics worked in places like India and identifying means of blocking them.
“The situation with a film like Satluj…is a warning call — not just for Indians, but other countries around the world when it comes to how governments are going to control the creative business,” Ganguly says.
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The post has since been deleted.
Soon after, Musk clarified in another post, “entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges. I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to 2 people to be spokesmen for the petition.”
Musk gave out the two $1 million checks at a rally in Brown County on March 30, 2025, shortly before the April 1 election. Days prior, Musk’s America PAC awarded another million-dollar check to a Wisconsin voter who signed its petition opposing “activist judges.” The PAC also offered registered voters $100 if they signed the petition or referred someone to sign it.
Multiple efforts to stop Musk
The complaints are not the only effort to rein in Musk’s political spending.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit on March 28, 2025, a day after Musk’s first social media post, seeking to stop Musk from distributing the checks.
Musk’s attorneys at the time had argued that an injunction would “restrain Musk’s political speech and curtail his First Amendment rights.”
The million-dollar giveaways were intended to “generate a grassroots movement in opposition to activist judges, not to expressly advocate for or against any candidate,” Musk’s attorneys argued in legal filings.
State courts ultimately declined to block the giveaways and the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied Kaul’s emergency petition without explaining its reasoning.
Last June, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a government watchdog, and two voters filed a lawsuit alleging that Musk, America PAC, and another of Musk’s political organizations violated laws on election bribery and unauthorized lotteries. It also argues that their conduct constituted an unlawful civil conspiracy and public nuisance.
The lawsuit seeks to bar Musk from offering similar cash payments to Wisconsin voters in future elections. The lawsuit is pending in Brown County.
Musk’s America PAC held similar million-dollar giveaways in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. Musk announced in October that year that the group would award $1 million every day to a registered voter in one of seven swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments. The group also offered money to petition signers who referred another voter to sign it.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner sued Musk and America PAC, arguing that the giveaway was an illegal lottery under Pennsylvania law. But Judge Angelo Foglietta declined to issue an injunction. Musk’s attorneys had argued that the recipients were selected to serve as paid spokespeople.
Last May, Musk announced that he planned to significantly reduce his political spending.
“In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said. “I think I’ve done enough.”
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World Models Are AI’s Next Frontier
Inside the labs building the next generation of AI, a phrase has been gaining weight: world models. A large language model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini predicts what comes next in text. World models, in contrast, learn dynamics from observation, then simulate forward to test what happens next. They model the world itself, rather than just descriptions.
Yann LeCun, who left Meta in late 2025 to launch Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, has built his research program around it. Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, has made world models central to its push toward more general AI. Sam Altman has called OpenAI’s Sora a world simulator, a claim that is contested. Fei-Fei Li raised a billion dollars for her company World Labs to pursue what she calls “spatial intelligence.” Jensen Huang, meanwhile, is building the simulation platforms and compute behind the next wave of AI, as NVIDIA did for large language models.
The term is used loosely; not everything marketed as a “world model” qualifies in the strict architectural sense.
The bet, and the reason LeCun rejects video-generators like Sora, is that a model trained on how a system behaves rather than how it looks, an architecture he calls JEPA, will generalize better to the physical world. It is not a product category but an architecture that could take AI from fluent at language but with no real model of the physical world, to a grounded understanding of how that world behaves.
If they are right, this is more than another commercial AI cycle. It is the period in which the substrate of the next AI gets built, and what gets built now, by whom and on what data, will shape what AI can do for years. The potential for solving problems in climate, oceans, the biosphere, and the biology of disease is vast.
What AI has already accomplished for the Earth
I started my career as a climate scientist at NASA running ocean-atmosphere simulations on supercomputers. I later co-wrote, with the World Economic Forum and Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, two of the earliest reports on AI and the Earth system. A lot of what we predicted has happened.
AI now spots wildfires and methane leaks from orbit. Today’s weather forecasts are unrecognizably better. Google’s flood forecasting runs in over 150 countries. Neural weather models, from DeepMind’s GraphCast to systems now run by the public forecasting agencies themselves, have matched or beaten the best physics-based forecasts at a fraction of the compute cost, though they still trail on extremes and tail risk.
These are real gains. But the hardest problems have barely moved: what a hurricane will do at landfall, when the next drought breaks, how ocean circulation behaves as the ice melts.
Sub-seasonal weather forecasts—the window that drives water, energy, and agricultural planning—remain weak. The forests, soils, and vegetation that absorb roughly a third of our emissions carry the largest uncertainty in the entire carbon budget. Unlike fossil fuel emissions or atmospheric carbon dioxide, this land carbon sink cannot be measured directly at the global scale; it has to be inferred. And tropical convection, the storm systems that deliver rainfall for billions, unfolds at scales too small for global models to capture, so they fall back on rough approximations that scientists have tried to improve for decades.
Why haven’t these gaps closed? Not for lack of computing power, now trillions of times more powerful. Not for lack of data, now planetary in scale. Not for lack of physics, well established for the parts we understand. The bottleneck is representation: finding a way to model systems we can’t describe exactly because the physics is only partly understood and the measurements are sparse. Simply scaling up today’s language models doesn’t solve that.
The Earth system is modeled in pieces (atmosphere, ocean, ice, land), which simplifies away the signals that live in the coupling between them. The variables that matter most are largely unobserved: root-zone soil moisture, the deep ocean, the cavities under ice shelves. Higher resolution helps—the newest models capture storms directly—but a finer grid running the same approximations is still running approximations.
The hardest problems in science sit in the gap: too poorly understood to write down in equations, too sparsely observed to learn from data alone.
This is where world models could matter, not by replacing physics, but by learning the dynamics from the joint Earth-system record, with the physics we trust enforced as hard constraints. For chaotic systems, a world model can learn the unwritten dynamics while respecting the written ones.
Some of this is already visible. AlphaFold, NVIDIA’s Earth-2, and GraphCast are in operational use across biology and weather forecasting. They work where physics is partly understood, and observations are rich. What none yet does is learn the dynamics of the open systems whose uncertainty has barely narrowed: sea level, the carbon cycle, the coupled behavior of a warming planet.
World models will not deliver certainty. They will not collapse the sea-level range to a point estimate. Their value is narrower but real: tighter, more honest ranges of plausible futures: the band coastal planners and banks actually need. For trillion-dollar adaptation choices, that matters.
There is also a hard limit. A world model cannot forecast a regime the Earth has never entered, like the world after an Atlantic circulation collapse, because there is no data from the far side to learn from. No method can. But the relevant question is how close we are to it, which these systems can begin to help answer.
The opportunity
Three forces have converged. The architecture has matured: these systems can now be trained at scale. The Earth is now instrumented at a level that makes learning dynamics across the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice possible. And the capital that built the large language model era has begun to reallocate.
Enterprise applications have customers, contracts, and quarterly results. In 2026, the investment following world models is overwhelmingly driven by these metrics. But where the output is a public good, such as a narrower sea-level range, a better carbon-cycle model, or earlier warning of how the next drug-resistant pathogen will spread, the commercial model breaks down.
And what these models train on shapes what they become. A world model trained predominantly on warehouse logistics, driving footage, and engineering data—the territory of physical-AI ventures like Prometheus, the Jeff Bezos startup building an “artificial general engineer,” now valued at $41 billion—learns a particular kind of physics. One trained also on planetary observation, cell-biology, and grid dynamics learns something else.
The same architectures can work for the systems we live inside, given different data and different choices. The question is whether the labs commit to these problems as ambitiously as to enterprise, and whether the institutions holding the world’s most valuable scientific data make it available.
Beyond the enterprise
The language era taught AI to describe the world. World models aim to learn how it behaves. If their strongest advocates are right, they will become the substrate on which the next generation of AI is built: a scientific tool for understanding systems we cannot fully specify, and the capability AI needs to reason about and act in the physical world.
But getting better at the easy problems is not the same as reaching the hard ones. Whether world models reach the open systems depends on which data gets stitched together, which questions the leading labs take on, and whose problems get attention.
The AI build-out is only beginning, and public acceptance will help determine its pace. The stronger the case that these systems help solve humanity's hardest problems, the stronger the case for building the infrastructure they require.
The technical work will continue regardless. The question is no longer whether we can build world models. It is what we choose to model—and whether the hardest problems shape these systems from the start, or inherit them.
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