Scaling Laws

Kendall Cotton, Founder and CEO of Montana’s Frontier Institute, 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 Montana’s groundbreaking Right to Compute Act and how Montana hopes to protect access to AI and related technologies. We will discuss the history and reach of this Act and why other states may want to follow Montana's lead.

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Why Data Governance Is the Key to AI Biosecurity, with Jassi Pannu and Doni Bloomfield

Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, spoke with Jassi Pannu, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and Doni Bloomfield, associate professor of law at Fordham Law School, about their proposed framework for governing biological data to reduce AI-enabled biosecurity risks.

The conversation covered the origins of the proposal in the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA; the distinction between general-purpose AI models and biology-specific foundation models like genomic language models; the biosecurity threats posed by AI, including uplift of novice actors and raising the ceiling of expert capabilities; the proposed biosecurity data levels (BDL 0-4) framework and how it draws on precedents from biosafety levels and genetic privacy regulation; the challenge of capabilities-based rather than pathogen-based data classification; the institutional and regulatory mechanisms for enforcement, including the role of NIH grant conditions and a proposed mandatory federal regime; international collaboration and the importance of U.S. leadership given that most high-tier data is generated domestically; the relationship between the proposal and open-source biological AI development; and the offense-defense imbalance in biosecurity and the case for mandatory gene synthesis screening.

Mentioned in this episode:
Jassi Pannu and Doni Bloomfield et al., "Biological data governance in an age of AI," Science (2026)
Jassi Pannu, Doni Bloomfield, et al., "Dual-use capabilities of concern of biological AI models," PLOS Computational Biology (2025)
Dario Amodei, "The Adolescence of Technology" (2026)
The Genesis Mission Executive Order (November 2025)

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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.