Scaling Laws
- Folgen
- 258
- Erscheint
- wöchentlich
- Letzte Folge
- 20. Okt. 2026
Über den Podcast
Scaling Laws explores (and occasionally answers) the questions that keep OpenAI’s policy team up at night, the ones that motivate legislators to host hearings on AI and draft new AI bills, and the ones that are top of mind for tech-savvy law and policy students. Co-hosts Alan Rozenshtein, Professor at Minnesota Law and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas and Senior Editor at Lawfare, dive into the intersection of AI, innovation policy, and the law through regular interviews with the folks deep in the weeds of developing, regulating, and adopting AI. They also provide regular rapid-response analysis of breaking AI governance news.
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Folgen 258
Roadshow at North Dakota Law: Justice Jerod Tufte on AI in the Judiciary
Live from Grand Forks, North Dakota!Should the public be upset that courts aren’t using more AI? Justice Jerod Tufte of the North Dakota Supreme Court joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law …
Shownotes
Live from Grand Forks, North Dakota!
Should the public be upset that courts aren’t using more AI? Justice Jerod Tufte of the North Dakota Supreme Court joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, to take up that question. Drawing on his background in computer engineering and his own experience testing and applying new tools, Tufte considers what the public should expect from courts as AI’s capabilities grow.
The conversation builds on Kevin’s study of how AI may alter government and the operation of our constitutional system. How should judges weigh the risks of adopting new tools against the costs of delay? What might those choices mean for the judiciary’s ability to fulfill its constitutional role? Together, Kevin and Justice Tufte examine how decisions about AI could shape the capacity of public institutions to serve the people who depend on them.
Big thanks to the University of North Dakota School of Law for hosting!
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Scaling Laws Live at Nebraska Law: Matt Tokson on AI Surveillance
What happens to society, law and privacy when artificial intelligence makes it possible for police to detect nearly every observable crime? Matthew Tokson, Director of the Criminal Law Program and Associate …
Shownotes
What happens to society, law and privacy when artificial intelligence makes it possible for police to detect nearly every observable crime? Matthew Tokson, Director of the Criminal Law Program and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Lawfare Senior Fellow, to discuss this question. They recorded this conversation at the University of Nebraska College of Law as part of the Scaling Laws Roadshow.
For more, read Tokson's article, "Artificial Intelligence and Near-Total Law Enforcement," in the Nebraska Law Review.
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Hélène Landemore on Public Participation in AI Governance
Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a fellow at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of …
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Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a fellow at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to examine who should decide what AI is for. Starting with Landemore’s recent Noema essay, the pair discuss why decisions about AI’s purpose, limits, and governance should not be left solely to elected officials, technical experts, and the companies building the systems.
Landemore explains some key ideas--covering the fundamentals of deliberative democracy, sortition, and citizens’ assemblies. They then explore her proposal for global public consultation and deliberation. The duo conclude with hard questions about representation, expertise, and platform power.
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Child Safety AI Policy at Scale with Vaishnavi J and Dave Willner
Dave Willner, co-founder of Zentropi, and Vaishnavi J., founder and principal of Vys, join Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior …
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Dave Willner, co-founder of Zentropi, and Vaishnavi J., founder and principal of Vys, join Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, to examine how AI is affecting younger users and why existing child-safety responses often default to age gates, parental consent, and outright bans.
The conversation then turns to their open-source teen self-harm and suicidal ideation policies, which use age-banded rules and a four-zone framework: remove, suppress with a warning, suppress from recommendations, and allow. Dave and Vaishnavi explain how the policies were developed using more than 1,200 hand-labeled examples, how Zentropi’s CoPE classifier translates written policy into enforcement, and how platforms should evaluate false positives, false negatives, over-refusal, under-refusal, human review, and appeals.
Dave's Tech Policy Press piece.
More on their classifer and research.
Explainer blog - Overall: https://quire.substack.com/p/what-it-takes-for-llms-to-make-age
Explainer blog - Part 1: https://quire.substack.com/p/f4b99ab0-0127-4992-a31d-67b989f2cf58
Explainer blog - Part 2: https://quire.substack.com/p/ae6a5436-21e5-4fec-81fe-8025004f3b16
Full set of policies: https://zentropi.ai/u/vys
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Live from Columbia Law with Chloé Bakalar: What can constitutions teach us about governing AI?
Chloé Bakalar, ASI Ethics Lead at Responsible Superintelligence Institute (RESI) and a Senior Research Associate at University College London, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program …
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Chloé Bakalar, ASI Ethics Lead at Responsible Superintelligence Institute (RESI) and a Senior Research Associate at University College London, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, for a Scaling Laws Roadshow conversation recorded at Columbia Law School. Big thanks to Eliza Steffen for organizing a fantastic visit.
Recorded on the eve of Constitution Day, Chloé and Kevin explore the purposes of political constitutions, the American experience with constitutional change, and debate the extent to which the U.S. Constitution constrains private power. They then turn to AI constitutions: who writes them, whose values they reflect, how those principles are interpreted and revised, and how we can tell whether they meaningfully constrain an AI system.
The conversation closes by testing a broader proposal: whether governing advanced AI may require a dual constitutional structure—one governing the model itself and another governing the companies that develop and deploy it.
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Is Meta's Oversight Board a Model for AI Governance
Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law …
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Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, and guest co-host Kate Klonick to discuss what frontier AI companies can learn from the Oversight Board. Yoshino recently co-authored a Tech Policy Press piece with fellow Board member Ronaldo Lemos arguing that meaningful AI oversight should feature independent and representative overseers, external standards, and transparent, reasoned decisions.
The trio tests that proposal against some of the hardest questions raised by the Oversight Board’s own experience. Can a selective, precedent-setting institution provide meaningful oversight at AI scale? What gives a privately created board legitimacy to constrain decisions with global consequences? What powers would an AI oversight body actually need? And when does private oversight complement democratic regulation—and when might it merely give corporate power a new source of legitimacy?
Here’s the Tech Policy Press piece.
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Algorithmic Disgorgement with Christina Lee [Live From LawAI's Workshop on Law-Following AI]
Christina Lee, Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Privacy and Technology Law Fellow at George Washington University Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the …
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Christina Lee, Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Privacy and Technology Law Fellow at George Washington University Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, from the Institute of Law and AI’s Workshop on Law-Following AI in Cambridge, UK.
They discuss her forthcoming article, Beyond Algorithmic Disgorgement: Remedying Algorithmic Harms.
The conversation begins with the basics: what is algorithmic disgorgement, why did the FTC first use it in the Cambridge Analytica case, and how has the remedy evolved from data-deletion-plus-model-deletion orders into a much broader candidate remedy for AI harms? Christina explains why the remedy’s expansion matters, especially after the FTC’s Rite Aid settlement, where the alleged wrong was not unlawful data collection but the allegedly unfair use of facial recognition technology.
They also discuss alternative remedies, including injunctions, post-processing, fine-tuning, machine unlearning, and training-data attribution. Finally, they wrap up with Christina’s professional journey and the future of legal education in the age of AI.
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Building AI Assurance Ecosystem with Bri Treece (PACT AI) and Dr. Rob Slone (UL Solutions)
Bri Treece, Executive Director of PACT AI, and Dr. Rob Slone, Chief Scientist & Innovation Officer at UL Solutions, join Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and a Senior …
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Bri Treece, Executive Director of PACT AI, and Dr. Rob Slone, Chief Scientist & Innovation Officer at UL Solutions, join Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss a neglected layer of AI governance: the organizations that deploy AI in real-world products, services, and operations.
They discuss why PACT AI was formed, what AI assurance can learn from other industries, and why evaluating AI cannot be a one-time exercise. The conversation also covers PACT AI’s 90-day formation process and UL Solutions’ pre-existing work on AI-enabled products. Finally, Kevin asks Bri and Rob to pin down the major barriers facing the broader AI assurance ecosystem.
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Founders & Founders: Brandon Mitchell of WriteSea
Brandon Mitchell, founder of WriteSea, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the growing role of artificial …
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Brandon Mitchell, founder of WriteSea, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the growing role of artificial intelligence in workforce development. WriteSea’s platform provides AI-driven career guidance, helping job seekers refine resumes, practice interviews, and navigate modern hiring systems that increasingly rely on automated screening tools.
As policymakers and the public writ large assess the extent to which AI will disrupt the labor market, Brandon's efforts warrant particular attention. New tools such as WriteSea may play a key role in helping entry-level workers find jobs that align with their skillset.
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AI Consciousness with Anil Seth
Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and …
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Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to examine whether artificial intelligence could ever be conscious.
Drawing on Seth’s essay, “The Mythology of Conscious AI,” the pair attempt to define consciousness, develop the strongest arguments for and against machine consciousness, and assess what the current evidence can—and cannot—tell us. They also discuss the risks posed by AI systems that are perceived to be conscious and what AI labs, policymakers, and users should do amid profound uncertainty.
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Matt Abrams on Trust and the Migration to the Digital Age
Matt Abrams, technologist, investor, and co-founder of $1 Billion for Trust, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss …
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Matt Abrams, technologist, investor, and co-founder of $1 Billion for Trust, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the collapse of institutional trust and how AI may accelerate — or potentially help reverse — that trend.
The conversation explores Matt’s work to rebuild trust in information ecosystems, interpersonal relationships, and major institutions. Along the way, the duo examine the relationship between AI, information integrity, labor disruption, institutional legitimacy, and democratic resilience.
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Founders & Founders: Matthew Schwartz of Virgo
Matthew Schwartz, founder of Virgo, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss how AI is beginning to reshape …
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Matthew Schwartz, founder of Virgo, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss how AI is beginning to reshape gastroenterology. Virgo’s model is trained on one of the largest collections of endoscopy procedure videos ever assembled, opening new possibilities for earlier diagnosis, personalized treatment of diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, and faster clinical research.
The duo also examine how medical imaging data can generate new “digital biomarkers,” what role AI might play in shortening clinical trials, and how regulators and healthcare institutions are grappling with the promise—and risks—of deploying AI in clinical environments.
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Daniel Kokotajlo on AI 2040: Plan A
Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to …
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Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail his policy recommendation–AI 2040: Plan A. It’s a thorough analysis of a policy pathway to delaying superintelligence, which Daniel and his co-authors think is necessary to ensure that the disruptive effects of highly-capable AI systems do not outweigh the benefits.
Kevin asks Daniel to explain scenario scrutiny, address feedback from other AI policy stakeholder such as Tom Davidson, and detail what led him to already alter his estimation of how likely it is that policymakers adopt Plan A.
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DZ Kalman on the Role of Faith in AI Policy
DZ Kalman, fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, senior advisor at Sinai & Synapses, and host of Belief in the Future, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law …
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DZ Kalman, fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, senior advisor at Sinai & Synapses, and host of Belief in the Future, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explore what religious traditions can teach AI governance.
DZ and Kevin discuss religious responses to AI, Jewish technoculture, kosher supervision as a model for AI certification, and the limits of AI use in faith contexts. They also connect these traditions to contemporary debates about alignment, institutional trust, human dignity.
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Founders & Founders: Laura Davis of USLege
Laura Davis, founder of USLege, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to dive into how USLege is leveraging AI to …
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Laura Davis, founder of USLege, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to dive into how USLege is leveraging AI to transform the way professionals monitor and respond to government activity.
USLege’s platform aims to be the answer to the prayers of many policy stakeholders. It captures and analyzes legislative hearings, regulatory discussions, and committee proceedings as they happen, surfacing policy signals that often emerge long before a bill is formally introduced. Kevin and Laura talk about the fragmented information systems that shape American policymaking, how AI tools are transforming the practice of government affairs, and whether technologies like “live government listening” could make legislative activity more transparent and responsive to public demands.
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Google's Kent Walker on Regulating Frontier AI
Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google and Alphabet, joins Kevin to discuss Google's proposal for a two-pronged approach to AI governance: a Frontier AI Regulatory Organization, which like FINRA …
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Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google and Alphabet, joins Kevin to discuss Google's proposal for a two-pronged approach to AI governance: a Frontier AI Regulatory Organization, which like FINRA, would operate as an independent, industry-based governance body overseen by a federal agency and the application of existing laws to widely-deployed, less capable systems.
The two also discuss the timing behind this proposal and its relevance in light of the recent Hugging Face / OpenAI incident.
Follow Kent: @kent_walker
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The Politics and Politicking of AI with Assemblymember Alex Bores
Assemblymember Alex Bores ran for Congress on a platform that in many ways centered on AI policy. He therefore drew considerable support as well as substantial opposition from interest groups across the …
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Assemblymember Alex Bores ran for Congress on a platform that in many ways centered on AI policy. He therefore drew considerable support as well as substantial opposition from interest groups across the country. Though Bores lost in the Democratic primary, his experience is worth exploring in detail.
Alan and Kevin dive in with some key questions:
- what did he hear from voters on AI? are everyday New Yorkers worried about benchmarks being saturated?
- how did the millions of dollars coming into the race change its dynamics?
- what does this early episode in the political aspects of AI signal for the future of AI governance?
- what's the proper allocation of AI regulatory authority between states and the federal government?
Follow Alex at @alexbores
And, as always, get in touch with Kevin via @scaling_laws and @kevintfrazier
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Courtney Cox on AI in Adjudication [live from the Institute of Law & AI's Workshop on Law-Following AI]
Courtney Cox, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss her …
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Courtney Cox, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss her forthcoming article, Hardwiring Hercules?.
It’s a great read that builds on Dworkin’s idea of a perfect adjudicator, Hercules. Courtney argues that the debate over a “right to a human decision” has missed a central problem: normative uncertainty. Machines may struggle to explain their decisions, but humans often struggle too—especially when judges are uncertain about what they ought to do. At the same time, the common response that people merely have a right to a “better decision,” whether by human or machine, assumes we know what “better” means. Courtney’s paper challenges both sides of the debate and asks what AI governance should look like when regulators, engineers, and judges cannot simply “hardwire Hercules.”
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Founders & Founders: Nils Tracy of Authorship
Nils Tracy, founder of Authorship, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail the challenges and solutions to …
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Nils Tracy, founder of Authorship, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail the challenges and solutions to deploying AI in highly sensitive contexts.
Authorship enables users to map their AI policies to myriad use cases--from on-device AI tools to those connected to the cloud. It's a direct effort to tackle concerns that as AI use cases become more frequent and varied deployers may struggle to ensure compliance with key policies and laws.
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New paths to social mobility with Joe Seddon
Joe Seddon, Founder and CEO of Zero Gravity, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, to …
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Joe Seddon, Founder and CEO of Zero Gravity, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, to discuss AI, social mobility, higher education, and the future of opportunity. Zero Gravity is a UK-based platform that helps launch students from low-opportunity backgrounds into leading universities and prosperous careers.
The conversation explores whether AI can scale the kinds of mentorship, admissions advice, tutoring, and career guidance that have historically been available only to students with strong networks. The two also examine the future of elite credentials, the role of universities in preparing students for an AI-transformed labor market, and whether AI will disrupt entry-level white-collar work in ways that require new approaches to retraining, apprenticeships, and lifelong learning.
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Founders & Founders: Adi Tantravahi of Cofactor
Adi Tantravahi, founder of Cofactor, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to talk about how AI can help cut through the …
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Adi Tantravahi, founder of Cofactor, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to talk about how AI can help cut through the administrative red tape that underlies and, in many ways, undermines the modern healthcare system.
Cofactor’s AI platform focuses on denial management—an area where hospitals routinely lose revenue because insurance claims go unchallenged due to staffing constraints. Kevin and Adi unpack the economics of healthcare billing, why administrative overhead has grown so dramatically in American medicine, and how AI systems capable of autonomously managing appeals and reimbursement workflows might reshape the financial infrastructure of hospitals.
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All Things Data Centers with Andy Masley
Andy Masley joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare and …
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Andy Masley joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare and associate professor at Minnesota Law, to unpack the increasingly contentious issues related to data centers.
They discuss Andy’s efforts to challenge what he sees as misleading claims about data center water use, land use, electricity rates, and local community impacts.
Be sure to check out Andy’s substack here.
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Founders & Founders: Kal Clark of Zauron Labs
Kal Clark, co-founder of Zauron Labs, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explain how AI is already reducing …
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Kal Clark, co-founder of Zauron Labs, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explain how AI is already reducing diagnostic errors in radiology.
Kal details how Zauron’s AI system functions as a second-look safety layer, reviewing imaging exams for high-impact missed findings before those results translate into patient outcomes.
Kal and Kevin then discuss the scale of diagnostic error in modern healthcare, the institutional barriers that have prevented systematic second reviews, and how open-source AI models combined with on-premise deployment might allow hospitals to build their own diagnostic intelligence while protecting patient data.
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Lawfare Daily: 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI’—A Conversation with Cory Doctorow
Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and research director at Lawfare, and Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John's University School of Law and a senior …
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Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and research director at Lawfare, and Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John's University School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, spoke with science fiction novelist and technology journalist Cory Doctorow about about his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, which argues that AI is being deployed to turn workers into "reverse centaurs" who serve machines rather than direct them, and that the economics of the AI industry add up to an unsustainable bubble.
The conversation covered the distinction between centaurs and reverse centaurs in automation theory; why Doctorow thinks the AI business loses money on every customer and can't pencil out; whether the AI boom is a "productive residue" bubble like the dot-com fiber glut or a pure value-destroyer like crypto; how AI has fused with the state and the stock market, raising the prospect of a slow deflation rather than a clean crash; whether statistical inference can ever amount to genuine understanding; AI's effect on labor, from warehouse injury rates to the burden of "marking the AI's homework"; AI art and the problem of intention; security risks like "slop squatting"; and the threat of knowledge collapse and what it means for the future of education.
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Founders & Founders: Dhruv Diddi of Solo Tech
Dhruv Diddi, founder of Solo Tech, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the emerging frontier of Physical AI …
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Dhruv Diddi, founder of Solo Tech, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the emerging frontier of Physical AI. Solo Tech builds infrastructure that allows developers to deploy AI models directly onto robots and edge devices rather than relying on cloud-based computation. In other words, think about allowing AI systems to operate in remote areas that have traditionally struggled to leverage the latest and greatest tech.
Kevin and Dhruv look into what it takes to move AI systems out of digital environments and into the physical world. They also chat about the idea of "gyms" for AI and policy challenges associated with highly-sophisticated robots becoming more ubiquitious.
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"The God Test": AI as Cosmic Reckoning, with Robert Wright
Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare, spoke with Robert Wright—author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True, and the writer behind the NonZero Newsletter and …
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Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare, spoke with Robert Wright—author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True, and the writer behind the NonZero Newsletter and podcast—about his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which argues that AI is an evolutionary threshold on the scale of the entire history of life, that we are collectively failing to grasp its magnitude, and that rising to the challenge will require both new forms of international governance and an expansion of human moral and cognitive perspective.
The conversation covered the multiple meanings of the book's title and what it means to view AI from a "cosmic" perspective; whether the public is finally starting to "feel the AGI" and where skepticism about AI's capabilities now comes from; how large language models are trained and Wright's claim that we have built "machines that create machines that think"; whether these systems genuinely understand, what Searle's Chinese Room and Nagel's "what is it like to be a bat?" have to do with it, and the open question of AI moral patienthood; the two families of AI risk—bad actors empowered by AI versus AI itself going rogue—and why the near-term disruption to jobs, relationships, and security may matter most; the "But China!" argument against AI regulation, China hawkishness, and why Wright thinks racing toward superintelligence is dangerously destabilizing; the case for "global governance" over "world government" and the perils of concentrating AI power at home; and why a book about AI and geopolitics closes with a call for mindfulness, cognitive empathy, and transcending the psychology of tribalism.
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Justified Posteriors join Scaling Laws: Two economists and two lawyers walk into a podcast studio
In this cross-pod episode, Alan and Kevin join Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin of Justified Posteriors to explore a big question: what should AI be for?The conversation begins with Pope Leo XIV’s recent …
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In this cross-pod episode, Alan and Kevin join Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin of Justified Posteriors to explore a big question: what should AI be for?
The conversation begins with Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical. The group discusses how economists should think about the Church’s role in AI debates, what counts as an AI-related market failure, whether moral and religious institutions can help address social harms, and whether such interventions risk crowding out private action or local experimentation.
The episode then turns to the emerging idea of positive alignment. A recent paper, Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing, argues that AI alignment has focused too heavily on negative alignment—preventing harms such as manipulation, bias, dangerous outputs, and misuse—and should also ask how AI systems can actively support autonomy, wisdom, truth-seeking, pluralism, and human flourishing.
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Explain to Shane (Tews) and Scaling Laws
Shane Tews, host of Explain to Shane and nonresident senior fellow at AEI, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the …
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Shane Tews, host of Explain to Shane and nonresident senior fellow at AEI, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, for a cross-post conversation about the AI and cyber executive order, workforce disruption, and the future of education. They also share their respective research agendas for the summer.
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Lawyering on the Frontier with Janel Thamkul
Janel Thamkul, former frontier counsel team member at Anthropic, joins Kevin Frazier to discuss what it means to practice law at the frontier of AI.This episode starts with a review of Janel’s fascinating and …
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Janel Thamkul, former frontier counsel team member at Anthropic, joins Kevin Frazier to discuss what it means to practice law at the frontier of AI.
This episode starts with a review of Janel’s fascinating and varied background. Next, she walks through her initial exploration of a career in art before eventually pivoting to the law based on some very formative experiences. Kevin and Janel then investigate some of the most pressing and open questions related to transformative AI.
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Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI, with Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock
Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI (LawAI), spoke with Christoph Winter, LawAI Founding Director and Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the …
Shownotes
Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI (LawAI), spoke with Christoph Winter, LawAI Founding Director and Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the University of Cambridge, and LawAI Senior Research Fellow Charlie Bullock, about their new paper "Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty," which argues that, given the possibility of transformative AI within the next decade and deep uncertainty about its capabilities and risks, governments should aggressively build the institutional capacity to regulate competently when needed, rather than either deferring to the market or locking in premature substantive rules.
The conversation covered the four foundational assumptions underlying the paper and what makes the optionality "radical"; the difficulty of regulating an exponentially improving and poorly understood technology and what it means to "feel the AGI"; why a pure permissionless-innovation approach breaks down once the national-security implications of transformative AI come into view; why the European precautionary approach risks regulating without the expertise to enforce; the centrality of hiring and talent and what an adequately funded U.S. counterpart to the UK AI Security Institute would look like; the concrete work that such an agency would do, including evaluations, standard-setting, and procurement-side cybersecurity requirements modeled on CMMC; the importance of building international information-sharing channels among liberal democracies before they are urgently needed; and the case against broad federal preemption of state AI laws before any federal regulatory framework exists.
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