Scaling Laws

On Friday, March 20, the Trump Administration announced a National Policy Framework for AI. White House officials have stressed that they want Congress to act on the framework's recommendations within the year. What this all means for AI policy is an open question that warrants calling in two of the smartest folks in the business: Helen Toner, Interim Executive Director at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), and Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.

This rapid response episode cuts to the chase as everyone makes sense of this important development in the national AI policy conversation.

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Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, spoke with Woodrow Hartzog, the Andrew R. Randall Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Jessica Silbey, Professor of Law and Honorable Frank R. Kenison Distinguished Scholar in Law at Boston University School of Law, about their new paper "How AI Destroys Institutions," which argues that AI systems threaten to erode the civic institutions that organize democratic society.

The conversation covered the sociological concept of institutions and why they differ from organizations; the idea of technological affordances from science and technology studies; how AI undermines human expertise through both accuracy and inaccuracy; the cognitive offloading problem and whether AI-driven skill atrophy differs from past technological transitions; whether AI-generated decisions can satisfy the legitimacy requirements of the rule of law; the role of reason-giving, contestation, and political accountability in legal institutions; the tension between the paper's sweeping diagnosis and its more incremental prescriptions; and the case for bespoke, institution-specific AI tools over general-purpose deployment.
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Tomicah Tillemann, President at Project Liberty Institute, joins the show. Tomicah offers a unique perspective on regulating emerging technology given his time as a venture capitalist and head of policy at Andreessen Horowitz and Haun Ventures. His contemporary focus is on identifying “policy solutions that enable human agency and human flourishing in an AI-powered world.” It’s a tall order that he breaks down with Kevin Frazier, a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, Adjunct Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, and a Senior Editor at Lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kevin Frazier hangs out with Caleb Watney of the Institute for Progress and Austin Carson of SeedAI at the Ashby Workshops to discuss the long-run policy foundations needed for the AI Age.

Rather than focusing on near-term regulation, the conversation explores how AI challenges existing assumptions about state capacity, research funding, talent pipelines, and institutional design. Caleb and Austin unpack concepts like meta-science, public compute infrastructure, immigration policy, and congressional expertise—and explain why these “boring” policy areas may matter more for AI outcomes than headline-grabbing rules.

The episode also examines how AI policy discourse has evolved in Washington, what lessons policymakers should draw from efforts like the National AI Research Resource, and why many AI governance failures may ultimately be failures of institutions rather than intent.
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Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and research director at Lawfare, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and senior editor at Lawfare, were joined by Dean Ball, senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the Hyperdimensional newsletter, and Timothy B. Lee, author of the Understanding AI newsletter, for a joint crossover episode of the Scaling Laws and AI Summer podcasts about the escalating dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over AI usage restrictions in military contracts.

The conversation covered the timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute and Secretary Hegseth's supply chain risk designation; the legal basis for the designation under 10 U.S.C. § 3252 and whether it was intended to apply to domestic companies; the role of personality and politics in the dispute; OpenAI's competing Pentagon contract and debate over whether its terms actually match Anthropic's red lines; public opinion polling showing bipartisan concern about AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons; the broader question of what the government-AI industry relationship should look like; the prospect of partial or full nationalization of AI capabilities; and whether frontier AI models are actually decisive for military applications.
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