In this rapid response episode, Lawfare senior editors Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier and Lawfare Tarbell fellow Jakub Kraus discuss President Trump's new executive order on federal preemption of state AI laws, the politics of AI regulation and the split between Silicon Valley Republicans and MAGA populists, and the administration's decision to allow Nvidia to export H200 chips to China.

 Mentioned in this episode:

• Executive Order: Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
• Charlie Bullock, "Legal Issues Raised by the Proposed Executive Order on AI Preemption," Institute for Law & AI

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Graham Dufault, General Counsel at ACT | The App Association, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explore how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are navigating the EU's AI regulatory framework. The duo breakdown the Association's recent survey of SMEs, which included the views of more than 1,000 enterprises and assessed their views on regulation and adoption of AI.

Follow Graham: @GDufault and ACT | The App Association: @actonline

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Caleb Withers, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, 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 frontier models shift the balance in favor of attackers in cyberspace. The two discuss how labs and governments can take steps to address these asymmetries favoring attackers, and the future of cyber warfare driven by AI agents.Jack Mitchell, a student fellow in the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, provided excellent research assistance on this episode.

Check out Caleb’s recent research here.

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Andrew Prystai, CEO and co-founder of Vesta, and Thomas Bueler-Faudree, co-founder of August Law, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to think through AI policy from the startup perspective. 

Andrew and Thomas are the sorts of entrepreneurs that politicians on both sides of the aisle talk about at town halls and press releases. They’re creating jobs and pushing the technological frontier. So what do they want AI policy leaders to know as lawmakers across the country weigh regulatory proposals?

That’s the core question of the episode. Giddy up for a great chat!

Learn more about the guests and their companies here:

Andrew's Linkedin, Vesta's Linkedin

Thomas’s LinkedIn, August’s LinkedIn

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Jeff Bleich, General Counsel at Anthropic, former Chief Legal Officer at Cruise, and former Ambassador to Australia during the Obama administration, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to get a sense of how the practice of law looks at the edge of the AI frontier.

The two also review how Jeff’s prior work in the autonomous vehicle space prepared him for the challenges and opportunities posed by navigating legal uncertainties in AI governance.

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Anton Korinek, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia and newly appointed economist to Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council, Nathan Goldschlag, Director of Research at the Economic Innovation Group, and Bharat Chander, Economist at Stanford Digital Economy Lab, join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to sort through the myths, truths, and ambiguities that shape the important debate around the effects of AI on jobs. 

We discuss what happens when machines begin to outperform humans in virtually every computer-based task, how that transition might unfold, and what policy interventions could ensure broadly shared prosperity.

These three are prolific researchers. Give them a follow to find their latest works.

Anton: @akorinek on X

Nathan: @ngoldschlag and @InnovateEconomy on X

Bharat: X: @BharatKChandar, LinkedIn: @bharatchandar, Substack: @bharatchandar

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Gabriel Nicholas, a member of the Product Public Policy team at Anthropic, joins Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to introduce the policy problems (and some solutions) posed by AI agents. Defined as AI tools capable of autonomously completing tasks on your behalf, it’s widely expected that AI agents will soon become ubiquitous. The integration of AI agents into sensitive tasks presents a slew of technical, social, economic, and political questions. Gabriel walks through the weighty questions that labs are thinking through as AI agents finally become “a thing.”

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Alan Rozenshtein, senior editor at Lawfare, spoke with Brett Goldstein, special advisor to the chancellor on national security and strategic initiatives at Vanderbilt University; Brett Benson, associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University; and Renée DiResta, Lawfare contributing editor and associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.

The conversation covered the evolution of influence operations from crude Russian troll farms to sophisticated AI systems using large language models; the discovery of GoLaxy documents revealing a "Smart Propaganda System" that collects millions of data points daily, builds psychological profiles, and generates resilient personas; operations targeting Hong Kong's 2020 protests and Taiwan's 2024 election; the fundamental challenges of measuring effectiveness; GoLaxy's ties to Chinese intelligence agencies; why detection has become harder as platform integrity teams have been rolled back and multi-stakeholder collaboration has broken down; and whether the United States can get ahead of this threat or will continue the reactive pattern that has characterized cybersecurity for decades.

Mentioned in this episode:

• "The Era of A.I. Propaganda Has Arrived, and America Must Act" by Brett J. Goldstein and Brett V. Benson (New York Times, August 5, 2025)
• "China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare" by Julian E. Barnes (New York Times, August 6, 2025)
• "The GoLaxy Papers: Inside China's AI Persona Army" by Dina Temple-Raston and Erika Gajda (The Record, September 19, 2025)
• "The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite" by Renée DiResta (The Atlantic, September 2020)

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California State Senator Scott Wiener, author of Senate Bill 53--a frontier AI safety bill--signed into law by Governor Newsom earlier this month, joins Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor at Minnesota Law and Research Director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explain the significance of SB 53 in the large debate about how to govern AI.

The trio analyze the lessons that Senator Wiener learned from the battle of SB 1047, a related bill that Newsom vetoed last year, explore SB 53’s key provisions, and forecast what may be coming next in Sacramento and D.C.

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Mosharaf Chowdhury, associate professor at the University of Michigan and director of the ML Energy lab, and Dan Zhao, AI researcher at MIT, GoogleX, and Microsoft focused on AI for science and sustainable and energy-efficient AI, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the energy costs of AI. 

They break down exactly how much a energy fuels a single ChatGPT query, why this is difficult to figure out, how we might improve energy efficiency, and what kinds of policies might minimize AI’s growing energy and environmental costs. 

Leo Wu provided excellent research assistance on this podcast.

Read more from Mosharaf:

https://ml.energy/ 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

Read more from Dan:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03003’

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11581

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