One-half of the sibling pair charged in connection with an IED discovered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa allegedly consulted an AI bot to help the other sibling flee the country.

Alen is believed to still be in China.

After Alen Zheng, 20, allegedly planted the bomb at the base visitor center last month, his sister Ann Mary Zheng, 27, allegedly used ChatGPT to help Alen escape to China. Federal prosecutors claim that she asked the bot:

how to obtain a Chinese visa,how they might transfer ownership of some of Alen’s belongings to her, andto find schools in China that Alen might be able to attend.

Ann Mary is accused of helping Alen cover his tracks and then evade capture. She has been charged with evidence tampering and assisting after the fact and faces up to 30 years if convicted. She appeared in court on Tuesday regarding possible pretrial release, though the judge has not yet issued a ruling.

RELATED: China caught ‘trying to disrupt our justice system’: DOJ accuses 10 Chinese spies and communist agents of ‘malign schemes’

WD Stuart/Getty Images

A 911 call to report the bomb came in on March 11, but investigators found nothing in their initial search of the base. An IED was later discovered on March 16. The device never detonated, but officials have described it as “viable” and “potentially very deadly.”

​Chatgpt, Macdill air force base, Ann mary zheng, Alen zheng, Tampa, China, Ied, Politics 

President Donald Trump has announced plans to issue paychecks to Department of Homeland Security employees amid the ongoing partial shutdown, which has left Transportation Security Administration officers working without pay for weeks and jammed up airport security lines nationwide.

TSA agents’ last full paycheck was on Feb. 14. Nearly 500 workers have quit since the shutdown started, and the callout rate reached 11.83% as of March 26, CNN reported.

‘Defund-the-police Democrats have kept @DHSgov closed in an attempt to slow down ICE’s efforts to remove murderers, rapists.’

Trump previously directed the DHS to work with the Office of Management and Budget “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown, consistent with applicable law.”

As a result of Trump’s directive, on March 30, many TSA workers received at least part of their overdue pay after missing two full paychecks.

On Thursday, Trump announced additional steps to ensure all DHS employees receive their wages.

“Republicans are UNIFIED, and moving forward on a plan that will reload funding for our FANTASTIC Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement Officers,” Trump wrote in a post on social media.

RELATED: Senate approves DHS funding — but there’s a catch

CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images

Trump criticized Democrats for being “fully and 100% committed to the Radical Left Policy of Open Borders and Zero Immigration Enforcement” that has allowed unvetted “Murderers and Criminals of all types” into the United States. He added that he hopes their actions will “cost them dearly in the Midterms!”

The president stated that he would take executive action to address the ongoing issue.

“I will soon sign an order to pay ALL of the incredible employees at the Department of Homeland Security,” Trump wrote. “Their families have suffered far too long at the hands of the Extreme Liberal ‘Leaders,’ Cryin’ Chuck Schumer and Hakeem ‘High Tax’ Jeffries.”

Trump declared that “help is on the way for our Brave and Patriotic Public Servants who have continued to work hard, and do their part to protect and defend our Country.”

RELATED: Delta revokes major travel perk for Congress amid ongoing DHS shutdown

Shelby Tauber/Bloomberg/Getty Images

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin thanked the president for his latest announcement.

“For over a month, the defund-the-police Democrats have kept @DHSgov closed in an attempt to slow down ICE’s efforts to remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists from our country and open our borders. Time and time again the Democrats have prioritized violent illegal aliens over American citizens,” Mullin wrote.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​News, Markwayne mullin, Department of homeland security, Dhs, Donald trump, Trump, Trump administration, Trump admin, Border patrol, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice, Transportation security administration, Tsa, Chuck schumer, Hakeem jeffries, Dhs shutdown, Politics 

Social media was taken by storm this week when reporting by the Daily Mail revealed that Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, was allegedly chatting up women from the “bimbofication” fetish scene.

However, not only was he allegedly praising the heavily augmented appearances of the women he spoke to — but he was allegedly sending them photos of himself wearing leggings, a flesh-colored, skintight suit, and what appear to be balloons mimicking large breasts under his top.

“I heard a really, really interesting story about this. So he [allegedly] liked to message online porn performers and send them money. Allegedly, he sent them up to $25,000. And the obvious place you go with this is, ‘Hey, his behavior could have left Kristi Noem vulnerable to blackmail,’” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales comments.

And according to an article from the New York Post, Noem herself responded that she was “blindsided.”

However, Gonzales isn’t buying it.

“Are you really blindsided by something like that? Like, you really have no idea that your husband likes to cross-dress and he’s sending up to $25,000 to online porn stars?” Gonzales asks.

“In our marriage,” Gonzales tells her husband, Stephen, “that just literally would not be possible to be blindsided by.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Kristi noem, Bimbofication, Kristi noem husband, Bryon noem 

The Maven Smart System is briefly explained in the “one-pager,” a Palantir-produced document that frames the system as an “AI-enabled platform” for something called Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control. The prose is the sterile, aspirational language of the Pentagon, emphasizing a “live, synchronized view of the battlespace,” the language of “decision advantage,” a phrase that suggests we can outthink our adversaries by processing data more accurately.

MSS is no longer an AI prototype. It has become a durable layer in the military’s information architecture, a Program of Record transitioned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2023.

In the first 24 hours alone, the system processed a thousand targets.

The money is real and the timelines are long: a $480 million Army contract in 2024, followed by a $795 million modification in 2025, both reaching toward 2029. There is also a $99.8 million vehicle designed to expand access across the services. MSS is a story of how an automation effort for drone video became the epistemic infrastructure for modern American war.

Birth of a twin

The precondition for MSS was a crisis of human attention. In 2017, Deputy Secretary Robert O. Work issued a memo establishing the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, nicknamed Project Maven. The problem was simple and overwhelming: They had too much data and not enough eyes. Enormous volumes of full-motion video from unmanned systems were piling up, outstripping the capacity of human analysts to “process, exploit, and disseminate” them. The initial goal was simple: data labeling and algorithms to detect, classify, and alert.

By the time the project evolved into the Maven Smart System, it had become an apparatus that observes, organizes, and normalizes the battlespace. At its heart is the “Maven Ontology,” described as an operational “digital twin.” In this world, the messy heterogeneity of war (the images, the reports, the movement) is translated into a queryable database of objects, properties, and links. The analyst no longer interprets raw feeds; he operates on already-structured objects. The battlespace becomes a manipulable database.

The interface itself (Gaia for mapping, Maverick and Target Nexus for identification) is designed for scaling. It includes LLM-powered workflows and an Agent Studio in which users can build interactive assistants to query the ontology in natural language. One can ask for “detections of X” across thousands of objects and receive an answer in seconds. These interfaces are sometimes described as video game-like, which captures the ease of navigation while minimizing the gravity of the destruction it represents.

RELATED: Trump acted first — and the ‘experts’ are furious because it worked

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

By early 2026, the user base had doubled to 20,000 active participants, a scaling that found its ultimate expression in Operation Epic Fury. In the first 24 hours alone, the system processed a thousand targets, with many thousands more to follow. This is the kill chain compressed from hours to minutes, an acceleration that effectively removes the friction of deliberation. War is no longer an event to be survived, but a dataset to be optimized, a feedback loop in which the destruction of the target serves primarily to improve the next detection.

How fast is too fast?

The logic of the platform is “fight-tonight” readiness and “rapid sensor-to-shooter engagements.” The Marine Corps speaks of a “fully digital workflow” for target management, pressuring the military toward a tempo in which speed is the organizing value. Yet the demands of war require discrimination and proportionality, context-sensitive reasoning that cannot be scaled by a Model Catalog.

The danger is the category error: treating the output of the machine as if it were a judgment. Humans have a tendency to “automation bias,” to over-trust the platform, especially under the crushing pressure of time. When the system pre-structures perception and prioritization, responsibility is dispersed through chains of mediation and eroded before human approval is even requested.

The platform is spreading through sale and licensing agreements like enterprise software. NATO has adopted “MSS NATO” for Allied Command Operations, with training already integrating the system into exercises and simulations. In the U.S. Army, the fielding is rapid, with training described as an “accelerated learning effort.” Software now changes faster than doctrine, habits, or the slower virtues of judgment.

The Pentagon has “Responsible AI Guidelines” and strategy documents that emphasize the ability to disengage or deactivate systems with unintended behavior. These frameworks exist in constant tension with the platform’s own gravity within the process, which pulls toward more data, more detections, and faster workflows.

We are left with a question of agency. In the MSS architecture, control is lost or found in how the targets are modeled, how the alerts are tuned, and how the ontology is constructed. The system is built to make war more legible and therefore more actionable. Legibility, however, is not the same as understanding. One wonders if “decision advantage” can truly co-exist with the capacity to consider, to scrutinize, or to refuse a path that a platform has already made so efficient.

​Tech, Pentagon, Palantir, Iran, Epic fury, Battlespace, War