Rational Security: The “Happy FrAIday” Edition

Running isn't enough anymore. With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run, they evolve continuously,

powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows. So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent, so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger. Drachen Camping gegen Drachen, Targaryens, Targaryens in Triegen, Farad and E. Pishish Lachten. All that awaited you in the new Staffel. Also, streamed the newest Staffel House of the Dragon

and Alessirian from Game of Thrones, Nur, or for HBO Max.

“Kevin, you got to do a little World Cup, I'm recently, is that right?”

Did some World Cup in, so I hung out with my sister who lives in Seattle and we went and saw the Belgium versus Egypt match, and the World Cup is a battle for the ages. Battle for the ages, it was quite the scene, it was difficult because Belgium and Egypt both were red, and so all of the fans, it was impressive because everyone was wearing red, but we just didn't know who was who, for, for, for, for, they don't know who to punch when you lose. Yeah, yeah, right, so thankfully,

the fighting didn't break out because no one knew who was on their side or not, but Seattle knows how to host a World Cup. It was, it was a hoot and a half as the kids say. Who were you rooting for? So I flipped a coin and therefore was for Egypt, my wife was therefore in favor of Belgium, and so I think we, we ended up with a tie, so everyone went home happy to some extent. I joined a World Cup sweepstakes thing where you're randomly assigned the team that you get,

so it's supposed to be exciting because maybe you don't really have anyone you're rooting for, and then you get another team to pay attention to, but I got cutter. It's just no point.

“They're, they're already out. I believe they've, they've lost the chance. Well, you know, Molly, you gave it your best shot.”

You really tried with team cutter. I did. I did. I was really rooting for them. I didn't give them any strategic advice or anything, but that might have been to their advantage. I'm not gonna lie. Everyone the Persian Gulf needs to kind of all the little silver linings they can get, so it's kind of a bummer, but you're throwing it, you're throwing them so much to help at this particular moment. Roger are you leaning into France and in Bapé? He's, he's destroying the, the competition.

He's had a great World Cup. Liberty, fraternity, and Mbapé. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security. The show we're invite you to join members of the Law Fair team. It's we try to make sense of the week's biggest national security news stories.

Whether they are in our lane or not, I am your host Scott Art Anderson thrilled.

“We back here with you for another week with a wonderful all star panel of my colleagues.”

Joining us this week is a trio of law fair senior editors. Rarely do I have my job lined up so easily for me in describing people's titles and affiliations. But joining us first is law fair senior editor as well as an AI fellow at, I should say, UT Law School in Austin, Kevin Fraser, Kevin. Thank you for joining us.

Always a pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me.

Also joining us is law fair senior editor Molly Roberts back on the podcast. Molly, thank you for joining us. Thank you. I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us.

I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us.

I would like to say thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. I would like to say thank you for joining us.

Thank you for joining us. a real set of interesting stories all in the zone of AI or AI adjacent legal actions, all which kind of lined up and all which are worth talking about with a little bit of politics thrown in for good measure. So let's get into it our first topic this week. Citizen Cainte, Cainte, Cainte. When the DENWACP sued Elon Musk's XAI under the Clean Air Act,

alleging that the company built dozens of gas-fired turbines to power a data center in Mississippi without relevant error permits and exposing nearby predominantly black communities to harmful

pollution, the Justice Department has opted to do something it has never done before.

It is intervened in a in that citizen suit against the private company in order to kill it.

national security because the military relies on XAI's grock model, including in relation to the Iran War to secure the nation. And also because the Constitution's vesting executive power in the president means private citizens cannot enforce federal law over the executive's objection, or at least this federal law over the executive's objection I should don't. How strong are these arguments and what would it mean for environmental and other citizen

enforcement lawsuits if DOJ worked prevail? Topic two, crock the vote. We may be living through the first true AI elections.

In Manhattan's 12th district Democratic primary more than $40 million in AI industry in AI

safety money was spent primarily at least in the part of the AI industry to defeat a little known previously assemblyman Alex Boris. And what rapidly became something of a national referendum on whether voters care about AI regulation in AI safety. Boris ultimately lost to arrival, although nobody that rival also a supporter of AI safety legislation. So a little bit perhaps more of a mixed picture than somewhat argue. Meanwhile overseas in Malaysia, parties are using AI

to do multilingual voice notes to use chat bots and other new AI driven technologies to reach out to voters and new and novel ways. Many of which we are likely to begin seeing if we have an already started seeing them here on our shores. And just this week in Washington, a new study has concluded that Frontier AI is perhaps more persuasive than ever, but also may not be as politically neutral as some suspect or one might hope. What does this all mean to Democratic politics when

“both the money and the messaging involved in our politics are increasingly shaped by AI?”

In topic 3, Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill! The government's Frontier AI, Kill Switch is now ready to

have its first day in court. If you recall, if you weeks ago, the Commerce Department's Bureau of

Industry and Security set anthropic and as informed letter, ordering it to suspend all access to its Fable 5 mythos 5 models for any foreign nationals, including those within the company, including its own employees. This ultimately led Anthrop to pull access to those models for everyone within a few hours, but this past Monday, a technology startup called Legion Legal Tech filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government alleging that it has acted in a way that is

a lawful in consists of relevant statues and raises a number of statutory and constitutional concerns. How strong is the legal challenge in what does it tell us about whether courts rather than the executive will end up defining the government's power to switch a frontier model on or off? So for our first topic, Roger, I want to come to you. We're seeing a pretty novel legal action. In some ways, actually, what is I would say a fairly conventional legal

action next to a fairly novel legal action? The NAACP filed a lawsuit against XAI under a citizen

“suit provision that essentially allows, I think anyone, I don't think really limiting one,”

affected by air pollution of a certain type, done in violation of the CA, at least a legislative violation of the CA, to seek both injunctive relief and then to also seek monetary damage, pretty substantial monetary damages against alleged violators, but those damages get paid to the U.S. Treasury, not to those individuals in question notably. This statutory regime, employed by the NAACP is now being invoked in a unique ways, both by the U.S. government,

but notably, I should say, also by XAI, the U.S. government's brief basically came in and supplemented

an argument made. I think on the same day, filed on the same day, in the motion to some as filed by XAI and the other defendant in the litigation, where they essentially argued XAI argued, hey, look, asset up the citizen suit provision is unconstitutional, because it infringes on the authority and the constitutional authority of the president to take care of the lobby, faithfully executed the enforcement power of the president in the executive branch and that you can't give

citizens suits of this type to this model, particularly where they're giving money to the treasury, that was a hook for them. And now we see the Justice Department intervening making the same argument, essentially saying, look, in particular, they focus particularly on the fact that these damages are supposed to accrue back to the executive branch. They're saying, you can't give a citizen the ability to pursue enforcement action on behalf of the executive branch. That's not

what we're allowed to do. We're at the sole authority and they invoke the false claims act in a ketam action, a type of action that those claims act is our most prominent example of, and some case law

“around that to argue, that's why we are have this ability to intervene and it's especially”

quash this claim by these plaintiffs. Talk to us about how this fits into the broader controversy of this case of this issue. And I should note also, they came in, the government came in with, I think, the much more conventional part of the brief, asserting, essentially, look, granting this lawsuit, which if the plaintiffs got what they asked for would essentially mean shutting down these data centers or at least the way that they're powering these data

centers would be bad for U.S. national security because it would impinge the development and use of grock a model that the U.S. government relies on. That's less conventional. It's not weird to see a statement of interest by the U.S. government saying, here are the policy concerns

aligned against this other argument. What does this stand out for you as like, how weird is this?

And what do you make of these different arguments? How credible do you find them?

“I think the comparison to the key Tam suit is not very strong. Key Tam suits are brought”

really the entire suit is brought on behalf of the government. These are not brought on behalf of the government. The statute creates a separate cause of action for citizens. And it creates it in case the government doesn't pursue it. For 50 years, it's been used that way. And this is the first time the government has invoked, has said that they have a right to end citizen suits. There is a provision in the law that says if the government is already

enforcing the law against pollution. I mean, the goal is to eliminate pollution. It's not just to get damages to anybody. It's to stop the pollution. In the past, if the government was, in fact, already trying to stop the pollution, then you could say, yes, we don't need a citizen

lawsuit on top of it. But it's never before been the case that you could say the government doesn't

“want to stop the pollution. And therefore, the citizen can't try either. And that's what this does.”

It would also, obviously, it's not just the Clean Air Act. It's all of the environmental laws. I mean, not all, but it's many the Clean Water Act and Recra and some others. And in fact, if you accept XAI's argument, which is even broader, which is that citizen suits themselves are unconstitutional per se, then you get even further out. And you know, like we have civil rights laws that that individuals are allowed to bring in addition to the government. Those would be endangered.

So it's an extremely, the impact would be enormous if this were accepted in its strongest form.

So I want to drill into some of the legal technicalities a little bit more. I've done a little

bit of work in ketam action that I agree with you, Roger. I'm not sure the government or XAI are frankly quite on good footing and trying to draw such a tight parallel. And even if they did, I'm not sure quite leave to the outcome they want. Before we do that, let's take a step back and think and put this lawsuit in the context of the burgeoning AI industry. And Kevin, I want to come to you for that. I mean, talk to us about this point. We know AI development in use is energy hungry.

It cuts a lot of energy to do it. And that has environmental effects. And that we seeing this, particularly in those communities, near these big data centers, so that become clustered in different parts around the country, those are becoming increasingly controversial. And we've, there've been lots of reporting particularly over the last few months. I feel like about communities pushing back against efforts to locate data centers close to them because of concerns about sometimes

environmental effects. Sometimes the economic effects that come with them, the other sort of effects. Talk to us about how this conversation is fitting into the narrative around AI law and policy. Like are these lawsuits? Is this a widespread view within the AI community that these lawsuits are a fundamental threat? Is XAI maybe a little bit ahead of the game or perhaps a bit of an outlier and willing to make such, as Roger said, like, pretty broad argument. Again,

anything DOJ is a narrower version of this than what XAI actually advances in its mission to

“dismiss about the limits here. Where does this fit into that broader landscape?”

Yeah, to quote a fantastic movie. I would just say it's a mess out there in terms of trying to make sense of all of the data center politics. We know that from polling, it's still not the case that the majority of Americans let's say have a blanket opposition to data centers. There is a strong and I'd say growing number of Americans who are concerned about data center development unchecked. And I think that this narrative building around this suit in particular only adds fuel

to the fire of folks feeling like they have been shut out of the process of having a voice through their local government as to how and when these data centers are going to be developed in their communities, we know that in particular there have been allegations that XAI, for example, has not been as transparent as other labs, let's say, or as other data center developers in how they are working with communities and what sorts of benefits and or extractive efforts

will be involved with that data center development. So to see that XAI is the target of this suit and then to see furthermore that their advancing a approach that would limit the ability of

public perception of this data center build out. So I'll just flag that as as one issue. The second

“issue is going to be around what are the true costs of data centers to our energy grid to land use”

and to water, shameless self promotion for a different law fair podcast. We have an excellent podcast coming out with Andy Mazley on scaling laws that dives deep into the weeds of water usage in land use and electricity rates, but this is the crux of the issues. To what extent are we seeing that data centers are actually exacerbating the climate concerns that folks may have or the electricity costs concerns that folks may have and when it comes to looking across the different

range of data center developers XAI traditionally has stood out as perhaps being more willing to use

less clean sources of power for their data centers which makes them a bit of an outlier on some of

these data center conversations. One of my very tired phrases of many is today's data centers are the worst data centers we will ever use. It's in the interest of Microsoft, of open AI, of anthropic, to be more efficient and to find better approaches to powering and running their data centers. But as of now, the technology that many of the labs are relying upon, including XAI, aren't being run as cleanly as many communities would prefer.

Yeah, I found what the Department of Justice did in the case pretty extraordinary. I mean, it seems like a really general and radical thing to suggest that the government,

if it doesn't want to enforce, can also null displace private enforcement. It's not just

if it is enforcing, it's if it's not enforcing, too, which seems to kind of take a lot of power away from Congress. If there's this citizen suit provision and the government says, well, no, not if we don't want the citizens to sue. And of course, XAI is arguing that citizen suit provisions are themselves unconstitutional. And then when it comes to the policy implications, not just for environmental laws generally, which obviously they're huge policy implications and not just for

all those other statutes like whistleblower, civil rights, various consumer safety statutes that also made of citizen suit provisions, but specifically for AI, it seems pretty dramatic, because if we're talking about stuff like the establishment of data centers at the moment in less Congress legislates on them, this is really the only constraint. And it would be

“doing away with it if the government is going to be consistent here. So, I think the implications”

are pretty big in Congress could legislate on data centers in some form, or it could legislate on the citizen suit question, right? It could say that the government can't come in and seek dismissal, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it to do that, because it doesn't do all that much. So, let's dig into the legal technicality this little bit, Roger and Kevin and Molly as well, if you guys have thoughts on this, like so they are trying, the government really leans heavily

on some case on the key-tam and false claims at context, which strikes me as a little bit of not quite the right parallel draw. Like a key-tam action traditionally is a case where the government has an interest, and it authorizes citizens to enforce the government's interests on its behalf by initiating lawsuit. This was actually super, super common practice early in the Republic. It has now become less common. There are actually lots of key-tam statutes on the books,

like I did account for a paper I would have a couple years ago. I think there's a more like two dozen, maybe more. But the only one that we really use anymore in part because there's have been narrowed substantially by the courts is the false claims act. The false claims act does allow the government to essentially decide, okay, we are going to take over a lawsuit and then potentially settle it on its own terms, like do away with it if it's chooses to do so. There are some

process and restrictions around that and I'm not going to pretend to be a full expert in it, but there is that element of executive control, and there is some case law on a lot of academic

“writing that's strongly suggest that's how you reconcile this particular fall of the false claims act”

with the generally viewed exclusion authority of the executive branch to be involved in law enforcement. Although again, I don't believe there's this ruling squarely on this point suggesting that it's absolutely necessary in this context. I don't think that that's been as firmly decided, although perhaps I've missed something in the last few years since I've looked at this. But here, this particular revision, it's really telling to look at the actual tax. I think this

is 42 USC 7604, citizen suits in the Clean Air Act. It says right off the front, the authority to bring civil action says, any person may commence a civil action on his own behalf.

is because individuals who wouldn't otherwise have standing because they couldn't articulate

an injury as a result of action are able to pursue a lawsuit and to clear damages to them.

“That's part of the key false claims act regime is that they actually get a slice of whatever”

damages they're able to claim on behalf of the government to motivate them to pursue the lawsuit. They're suing on behalf of the government. Here, that's like expressly not the case. And to end WACP, part of the argument that XAI advances is that they don't have standing because they can't sue them behalf of their own members in this context. I don't think that's actually very persuasive argument in this context, but like they clearly are making a core standing argument.

They're not asserting that they're suing on behalf of the United States. They're very clearly

secluded in a personal injury. The only mechanism that ties this back to the government is the

fact that civil penalties that the court has authorized to impose go back to the federal treasury. Although notably actually in this provision, they don't excuse the has to have to. There are situations where penalties can be spent and the court's discretion on quote unquote beneficial mitigation projects, which are consistent with this chapter and enhanced the public health or the

“environment up to a certain amount. All I think the amount of controversy here is maybe over”

that threshold. So am I wrong? Now this like why how persuasive this is a key term? Can you draw these words to parallels? Isn't there just a fundamental problem here to say that this is in any way suing on behalf of the government when it's not? These people have to suing their own behalf and then it limits the remedies. And notably with the penalty is one remedy, the other remedy that they're asking for. This case is injunctive relief. And that would be injunctive relief

in response to a claim of somebody trying to vindicate their own interests and legal rights. So why is that in obstacle here? How does the DOJ is trying to work around that? Yes, I agree with all of that. We haven't yet gotten the NWACP's brief, but that is obviously the main response. And I think just talking a little about the facts also would be useful because a lot is not disputed here, including the fact that X-A-I did not seek a federal permit.

I mean, you know, you can build the data center if you seek the federal permit and show that you're using the best available control technology. Why not do that? The name of it is Colossus 2, which should give you some idea of where we're going. These AI companies and they're marketing. I have to say, they really should do themselves some harm and emphasizing their own enormity and significance. Yeah, and you could tell this is an Elon Musk operation.

And it had 27 gas fired turbines when the suit was filed. They're up to at least 57 now. Each one is apparently the size of a single family residence. Again, it's not disputed that I don't believe that they spew nitrogen oxides, that they spew carbon monoxide, the fine particular matters. I don't think it's disputed that those cause are associated with heart disease, lung disease, other serious illness premature death. And it's not disputed that they didn't seek the

permit. And so the end of the ACP comes in on behalf of the neighborhood. It's a poor neighborhood apparently. It's really sort of greater Memphis, although it's located in northern Mississippi on behalf of a heavily black community. So they're they're suing on their behalf on the behalf of their children. They want to breathe clean air. And this is true of all of the citizen suit provisions of pollution. It's about people protecting their own interests in clean air.

“So I think you're exactly right. The key term argument is is a weak, a weak analogy.”

I have a theory about going on here. Actually, Kevin, I want to come to you about this and tell you something that makes sense from a perspective. So they have colorable arguments here. As to why they may have complied with this. Notably, state of Mississippi has a state of imitation plan to SIP. That's required of the Clean Air Act. They've enacted it. According to XAI, I haven't seen this contested. Although, baby, I missed it somewhere in the record. The state of Mississippi said you don't

need to take an additional measures. They've kind of more or less signed off on this. They don't see this as an issue under the Clean Air Act under their own law. And so the EPA doesn't appear to be

second guessing this under this administration last week. Which has approved the Mississippi SIP. So you've

got these arguments that I are still in the mix saying, "Well, look, we've complied with the relevant, state law, the agency doesn't deal with that." Now, I think colorably, that's the reason you have these citizens supervision so that they can subject these determination, the federal government, the state government, to judicial review and see if they're actually compliant with the statute. But regardless, maybe XAI is right. They have these statutory arguments.

because you have to litigate. This court's going to be pretty comfortable on the factual record and whether it understands about the statute assessing that kind of basic administrative law, you know, statutory interpretations sort of argument. And yeah, you're going to have to appeal that and go that up and down. When you throw all of these other constitutional arguments in the mix,

you're creating a lot of grounds for multiple rounds of appeal. And like, that's not always,

it's really bad for people on the ground. There's a reason to object to that. And you worry about preliminary relief in the interim. If you were, you know, the defend of these cases, you worry well, if we drag this out too much, they may just give them preliminary relief. And therefore, we're going to be in a position where, you know, we're going to pay a bunch of money even if we win the end. But here, you've got the US government saying, for national security reasons,

“we can't shut these things down. I think, particularly, this court is suggested those sorts of”

formulations that are security arguments way really heavily in the preliminary relief sort of scale. And it suggests that any preliminary relief is not going to shut down these reactors. Maybe harm, well, you know, penalties will crew things like that. But they're not going to shut down these reactors. And now you've set up multiple issues that will have to be litigated or at least could be litigated up to the public courts. Maybe the Supreme Court potentially, although I'm actually not

sure this argument is called a one of the Supreme Court will actually feel they need to take it up. And that extends the potential lifespan of this litigation. So I'm wondering, could this be a deliberate action on XAA, as part of a little legal bringsmanship, where when you're involved in these super super, you know, competitive races between AI companies, and they're desperately trying to throw everything they can in developing models, utilizing models, making them available, perfecting them,

that they just being able to kick the can down the road may bear dividends for them, even if

“it proves kind of expensive. That's kind of what I think might be happening here. But I'm curious”

by your response to that Kevin, whether you think that's feasible or not. I certainly think it's feasible when it comes to the reliance on Colossus 2 and related data centers of that scale. It's huge. I mean, when you go and you read anything about what the hyperscalers are looking for at this moment, they just need more and more data centers to be built. And so far, we've seen that in counties and communities across the country, there have been efforts to stall those projects

or delay those projects. And in many cases, they've been successful. And so the labs are becoming a little bit desperate to find any compute that they're able to access so that they can train the next model and so that these enterprise users can continue to deploy these models in highly sophisticated and highly compute intensive fashions. And so for something like Colossus to go offline,

would be something that not only hit the bottom line of XAI, but would impact the entire AI

ecosystem as we continue to be behind the curve of data center development with respect to what's needed by the industry. And Scott to your point, in terms of this national security argument, it's not going to be lost on the court. And I'm sure we're going to see this be raised in

“even more detail. The fact that data centers were targeted in the war in Iran in Yemen, I believe,”

was the first data center that was targeted. And so in terms of making a national security argument, it's not going to be too difficult. And I do think that will end up being pretty dang persuasive to the court in this context. Now what's unfortunate and to just riff off with what Molly was saying here, too, is this is another instance at which AI is really pressure testing our constitutional order and pressure testing separation of powers, because here we're seeing that the executive

is just able to move so much faster than Congress. And the courts are not going to, and I'm not advocating for this, the courts aren't all of the sudden going to go into turbo mode and adjudicate all of these AI claims faster than everything else, just because, you know, Elon might like that or not like that in this context. So we're seeing that Congress is a little flat-footed. The judiciary is acting as intended, but if the executive can move so much faster than the other

branches and act in so many myriad contexts such that they, you know, change the kind of political conversation and legal conversation, well that's not the system operating as intended. And just to finally end my rant, I've been able to talk with some of the folks in Memphis on the ground who are fighting these battles and who are talking with affected community members and it's just someone fortunate that we couldn't have had more local engagement from the outset and just more transparency

from the outset so that we could have seen data center development bring communities along with them so that everyone would have benefited from not having this sort of more adversarial approach and one that's going to just waste a bunch of money on lawyers fees which as a lawyer I don't even can down. Yeah, I mean, like the pressures of this and this administration's focus on them is really

notable and I'm not sure it's a rational, but you should clear, I'm not 100% critical of this,

administration take some pretty dramatic steps towards things, even things like deploying

small traditionally strategic nuclear reactors, potentially being used to help fuel data centers, other sort of sites. I don't know if that full step has been taken there but we've seen steps in that direction. It's been talked about a lot and this does kind of fit into that. What does strike me as like kind of extraordinary though, is the fact that you see the justice

“department buying into this legal argument that I think is buckless. I like don't think it's a”

strong legal argument, right? Maybe I'm wrong. I think maybe they could get away with maybe you can impose fees and penalties, right? But when you're talking about the injunctive relief somebody's suing for the benefit of their own harm, it's really hard to see how this something the US government has has a claim over just because that any fines happen to accrued to the Treasury department. So it's a pretty bold statement and like the fact you see the government, I'm less surprised

with the statement of interest. I know 100% of what have expected that honestly from this administration this case, but the fact they're pairing with this argument and particularly if I'm right, that it is an example of industry using a question or legal argument to extend the time frame without really hinging on in a way that doesn't hinge on the merit of that argument. That's a troubling thing to see the executive branch of the Justice Department play along with. I have to say and I

“will say Stanley Woodward has gotten the most press attention because I think he's one of actually”

scientists, but it's signed by a number of DOJ officials. I believe all political appointees but up and down including in our D the environmental natural resources division of the Justice Department. So it's got buy-in from a variety of people putting their money on this and again, I'm not sure it's I will see what happens with additional brief additional argument. I'm not persuaded that it's a particularly credible argument, at least when it comes to the injunctive relief.

And it's a little troubling through the Justice Department to take that position, I think. I'd just like to add there's another notchist potentially notchist aspect to this which is a corruption opportunity. We've talked a lot about abusive actions by DOJ that are vindictive against enemies of the president. Another type of abusive potential government action is those that are beneficial to friends of the president. And maybe coincidentally this data say Senator

is run by Elon Musk who this week at least is a friend of the president. And so you could see if the president has the power to turn off pollution suits brought against major industries all over the country, water pollution, clean air, other sorts just by the snap of the fingers. It's in a huge incentive to give donations to that president and try to persuade him to get you out of a jam. So that's another huge factor that if this theory is accepted, you've given another weapon,

“another pressure point into the hands of the executive. Yeah, I think it's a really, really good”

close-in point Roger. And again, these citizens provisions, I mean in theory, if you took a two broadly, while they really tie this to this provision, and then there are arguments to saying, oh, this is because these, at least in these cases where the funds go back to the treasury, but other A other statutes might have similar regimes. I don't know about the Clean Water Act on their statutes like that. But more fundamentally, they're not actually clearly limiting

the argument to those cases. It's potentially a good other citizen's suit arguments, which is what XAI

is arguing. So that itself would be a much broader investigation. It's basically not only limiting

these executive branch, but preventing Congress's ability to extend personal liability in some cases. The just environment doesn't go that far to their credit yet. They are really focused on the fact that these state fees go back to the treasury department in their brief. But they're also our extended to injunctive relief in a way that doesn't, isn't tied to those fees. So I'm not sure we can put entirely beyond it a broader expansion of the steering future cases. So let us now turn our eyes

from the legal realm to the political realm. Because we have had an election day this past Tuesday. Frankly, we've had like a lot of election days recently. This is election day season, particularly if you pay attention to primaries. We had another Toronto primaries in New York and a number of other states, but I've mostly been seeing New York results come through this past Tuesday. And some overseas election that have been kind of noble in Malaysia, where we're seeing a lot of

novel uses of AI. Even as in the United States, I'm sure there are some of those uses, although I haven't seen them, but I'm sure they're baked into various political ads and promotions I've been saying. But then in particular, we also are seeing the issue of AI. It's particularly safety around AI. It takes some extent this data center and the cost of data center issues as well. Increasingly playing a role in U.S. politics and then money from AI, the huge amount of money

that AI is generating, playing a part with large sums going into small races. In the case of the Alex Boris case in New York, which I think New York's 12th congressional district, really out some

40 million dollars in a race that size pretty insane, driven by AI money on either side of the

about what to talk about in this episode. Intersex was some really interesting scholarship. We've come out about the persuasiveness of AI. It's political bias. So talk to us a little bit about so what's some of the scholarship is pointing towards indicating about how AI can be used. It's effectiveness and it's impartiality potentially or lack thereof in these sorts of contexts and how it begins to intersect with these new uses and relevance as a AI we're seeing in the electoral realm.

“Yeah, and I think just a build off of your point earlier, AI is certainly on the ballot in many”

different contexts, whether it's data centers as you noted, whether it's a potential job displacement, whether it is U.S. in schools, all of these questions are issues that candidates are increasingly talking about and running on. We actually saw that the Senate president in Utah lost his primary on the question of data centers because in Utah there's been a particularly contentious fight around a data center proposed by none other than Shark, Kevin O'Leary, and that's been subject

to a lot of controversy. And so we know that AI is an incredible issue when it comes to

determining how some of these races are going to play out. But I want to focus in particular on how AI is going to change the nature of democracy and the nature of our kind of election erying to begin with. And this is really building on research that came out from Hackenberg at all, which is AI systems outpersuade expert humans. And to just nerd out for a second because I think this methodology is important to flag and interesting for listeners. Imagine you get a number of issues

“presented to you and you need to place your stance on a certain controversial topic from zero to 100.”

You enter a score of 71, then you are randomly assigned to either chat to a human or chat with an AI for about 14 minutes about that topic. And then at the end of that exchange, you then go again and from zero to 100, rank where you land on that issue by virtue of talking to either the human or to the AI. And this study tried to measure, did your stance change on that issue by virtue of talking to the AI or talking to the human? And when I say talking to humans, these researchers

recruited the best of the best in terms of human persuaders. So we have elite debate champions who were recruited. We have folks who were trained using AI to be more persuasive and to try to

be all the more compelling. And then we had incredible incentives that were given to these persuaders.

“So some of them would receive a bonus of, for example, 250 pounds if they were the most persuasive”

of the humans. And so we have humans, you know, on steroids of persuasion here, really trying their best to be as persuasive as possible. And when they were paired against AI, they lost. And they lost in a dramatic fashion. And we saw that when it comes to the persuasive power of AI, it is a order of magnitude more persuasive than the next best human. And that has huge ramifications on our election processes, because we know as you flag Scott, in places like Malaysia,

political parties are actively asking, how can we integrate AI into voter outreach, into message design, into just basic organizing? And if we know that AI is vastly more persuasive, then the next best human, well, that's a wildly different kind of an election that we're seeing go on. And we really have to start to ask questions about the agency, of voters, about the autonomy, of voters, and their ability to make sure that they're actually acting on their values

and not the values advanced by whatever AI system they're engaging with. Now, critically, researchers did find that if you constrained the AI in two specific ways, then you kind of defamed the persuasive power of those AI tools. So the first was to limit how quickly the AI could type. So if you didn't see that AI was being, you know, rapidly responding, whereas that elite debater was clacking away trying to get their response in, that definitely had a limiting impact.

The second thing, and this is just hilarious to me, is if you reduce the amount of content, the AI could spew at the recipient. That also significantly limited its persuasive effect. And so you could actually make AI on par with humans by virtue of just lowering the speed and limiting

the amount of facts that it threw out at a voter. So this has incredible importance to me as a

born and raised Oregonian. We are the home of the initiative and referendum. And when you begin to

suddenly find and galvanize a lot of support for a really bad ballot initiative. We have to ask

what safeguards are we going to impose such that we don't see entire election swayed just by virtue of one party or one sponsor having access to the best AI, whereas everyone else is still clacking away at the speed of an expert debater. Do your current managed services really help run your operations or are they just running in circles? Running isn't enough anymore. With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run, they evolve continuously, powered by AI embedded

directly into your workflows. So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage. PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent, so you can run faster, scale smarter, lead stronger. The worldwide Syrian Phenominus Zurück, they come from the island and drone guide.

Up so forth, there's the third step of the House of the Dragon by HBO Max. Here you can find the

whole world from Westeros on one board, Game of Thrones on Night of the Seven Kingdoms, and of course House of the Dragon. Drachen kämpfen gegen Drachen, Tygarians gegen Tygarians in Triegen, Farad and Epische Schlachten. All that awaited you in the new Staffel. Also, streamed the new Staffel House of the Dragon and all the Syrian von Game of Thrones, Nua, of HBO Max. Yeah, it's a really interesting study. I want to

spend more time on it. I read it in preparation of this episode. I've not been able to read it on methodology. You know, it reminds me of anybody who's done debate has seen,

particularly as a parliamentary style. I never actually did debate. I did a lot of debate

“adjacent stuff. I think it's parliamentary style debate where you'll see the world champions”

rattling off as many facts and points as possible in part because they're gaming the system because part of the metric that traditionally is used is check boxing on number of issues raised and number of issues addressed. And it kind of strikes me as that. It's so interesting to think about how we persuade authority and the fact that this would be more persuasive in an era when expertise is under so much doubt and there's so much lack of trust and institutions.

Because in some extent, you would traditionally expect the person able to most mimic this methodology of deploying facts and styles would be a genuine subject matter expert and yet the trust in those, the sense of credibility has been on the decline for a number of years now in part because of broad lack of social trust. So I have to wonder whether I want to look into exactly the more the context of which these were deployed and the types of what we're thinking of as persuasion

because, you know, for really, as a matter of volume and speed, that's interesting. And you can see cases where that would make a big difference. But you can also think a lot of,

“frankly, the most important cases, like politics where it's actually not or at least not universally”

important. These were matters of UK political debate that they were touched on. Yeah, so it was an issue issues based as opposed to a voter perspective. Correct. Yes, yes, yes, yes, use based in the UK. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Roger. Yeah, I just had a question for Kevin and I guess you might have answered it by the end, in effect. But I gather these are all written arguments. It's not oral arguments. Yeah, so this was as if you were engaging in like a

a text exchange. I agree with some. Okay. Yeah. So we'll see, you know, we're also seeing that AI tools are becoming more multimodal. There was an instance during the Super Bowl year of elections in in 2024 where the candidate for president in South Korea was using AI avatars such that the AI avatar would be deployed in novel situations and made more funny. For example, if the candidate was supposed to be engaging with a younger audience, for example, the AI avatar was released in a way

that he'd be slightly less boring. Apparently he wasn't a very energetic candidate. And so we saw in that Super Bowl year of elections that the sky didn't fall. Some people thought that was going to be the election year in which AI suddenly changed everything. And 2026 is on the horizon. And we again haven't seen AI change everything yet in these primaries. I will note that here in Texas, we've had debates around candidates who have been releasing ads that have used AI. For

example, there was one attack ad on Tallarico where he was reading his tweets. This wasn't actually

“Tallarico reading his tweets, but it was an AI version of Tallarico doing so. Is that okay?”

Is that not okay? Today we're talking on June 25th. We saw a bipartisan bill drop in the Senate,

images being shared. So there's just a lot for us as a political community to figure out about our level of comfort with AI in these sort of electoral processes. Some people you talk to will say, "Oh, well, we've had yellow journalism since 1901." And we've had political cartoons since even before that. This is just a new caricature or a new attempt to kind of change the discourse.

“Based off of this recent research, I think it's hard to make that sort of argument given just”

how persuasive AI can be. I may want to make it anyway, but before I do, let me be bringing Molly on this. Molly, you know, I know you are somebody who is, you know, things about the political context of these sorts of things. It looks at our political discourse. And I intersect with a lot of the policy and legal issue to be looked about. What jumps out to you about this? What do you find concerning? What do you find interesting? Yeah. When I think about AI in elections,

I guess I think of it showing up in two ways, both of which Kevin has touched on. So the first

one would be when it comes to deceptive content, whether that's something like a deep faker, shallow faker, or whatever of some candidate, which I agree is totally different from a cartoon. It's really trying to make you often think that it's the person. And a lot of voters probably are likely to believe that in a way that they are clearly not. If there's a sketched out cartoon.

“And then, of course, any AI generated misinformation, AI generated avatars on social media,”

the kind of stuff we've seen in past elections, but more sophisticated, cheaper, easier to produce it scale. So that would be one. And it does seem that at least here in the United States, the only regulation that it's forthcoming would have to do with disclosures, disclaimers.

It doesn't seem like we're likely any time soon and maybe ever because of the first amendment

concerns to regulate the actual creation of the material. So that's the number one, obviously concerning. Then number two would be AI used not for deception of any sort, but for persuasion, which is what Kevin was talking about at length with that study. And I guess there, it feels to me like it's also sort of an escalation of stuff that we've already seen in recent elections, there was a lot of hullabaloo around micro-targeting of advertisements, which was way more

sophisticated than what people have been able to do before when it came to getting various specific messages in front of specific people. And now it seems like, well, you're going to be able to probably do that a lot more easily. And you're also going to be able to do it more persuasively because the AI is going to be tailoring the messages themselves. And then I suppose for me the question is, how dangerous is that? And why is it dangerous and why is it different? Then

what we've seen before, why is it not just better persuasion? And we've always been trying to be as

persuasive as possible. Political parties have been. One reason would be, which again, Kevin touched on, that if they as bias, that bias is going to make its way in. Another reason that Kevin also mentioned would be, if your ability to persuade depends on having access to the best AI, then maybe you need a bunch of money to do it. And that disadvantage is the little guy. Although, to some extent, having access to AI at all makes it easier for small campaigns to develop the ability to persuade

larger audiences. So I would be one, two that I've been thinking about and that I was reading, and I wish I had the name of it, but I was reading an interesting paper about when I was looking into all of this would be kind of the idea of a sort of feedback loop. So like, I know that AI could be really useful when it comes to becoming a more educated voter. You could ask what does this candidate think about the issue and get a much better answer. But I know our ready people are doing

that and that and a combination of kind of who should I vote for based on my beliefs. And AI will give you an answer. Sometimes you might think it's good. Sometimes you might think it's bad. Probably depends on how high information you are or aren't in the first place and how well you know yourself. But if parties are going to start using AI to inform their strategies, either their strategies generally or their strategies for specific populations, they want to win

over. And then voters are also going to be talking to AI to help figure out who they're going to vote for. Then that's going to inform what AI tells the parties to think about and then it's all just

“going to spit back and just be this loop that's like an AI generated loop. But I think that's”

concerning because again, it raises the question of where's the information coming from, is it only going to be, is it going to be forward looking at all ever? Is it going to be organically generated from new human thoughts ever? And then the final thing I'd say in this long rambling discourse is that I think generally if you're relying on AI a lot, either as a party or as an individual to inform your decision in an election that is to a certain extent going

important in a democracy. Yeah, I think this studies really interesting, but the fact that a

boils down to AI's comparative advantage primarily over an educated trained individual is rapidity and volume is interesting because it's 20% you're like yes, but it kind of makes sense maybe when trained against our expectations currently. But will the expectations remain static when multiple people start when we start gaging out of the time and the throughput of data and

“facts is so constant? As particularly telling, I think that again, I want this one once more”

time with the study, you know, if it's debating policy issues and political issues where they're like kind of a subset debate and their previous political valences but somewhat more technical and technocratic, I wonder how it translates into voting persuasion, like actual candidates, where we know a lot of what people vote for is less about strict rationality. The reason we hear authenticity raised so much with candidates these days is because so many voter key swing voters make a decision

based off of very subjective senses about a candidate and no doubt like AI can play a prime role in framing those, but particularly if you restrict AI to being honest, if you limit the duplicitous uses of AI, which is hard, but they're ways to do it. I'm curious to see how that comes into play. I'm not sure it's actually not healthier to be able to give people a lot more information. But Kevin, I want to bring in one last album for you to part from this, because we talked about

“I think Molly did a great job drawing of those two buckets of use of AI, the deceptive,”

which is just misleading things and the facts, which is really presenting a broader way of facts and

ideas. There is a third use that Molly hinted at, I think it's worth bringing out as the

"Fallack Moment" but I'll put it at the "Arachula" or maybe the "Consultant" element of it, which is "U.S. AI." You put input into the "Lack Box." Hey, you know, who should I vote for based off XYZ, you may have what I think or you have a conversation with and it's a bit of an answer. That's one case where you're really because of the "Black Box" element of the AI that might be particularly concerning, because you're not giving a position to advocate for you are and then having it bring up the

best arguments, you're really asking some fairly subjective senses. How does that fit into the sort of equation? Yeah, well, first I just want to echo Molly's point on the fact that we can design AI tools that can actually improve and hopefully enhance our capacity to be better democratic citizens and to have a more deliberative discourse. As it stands right now, based off of studies like this, I presently am more worried about what I'd refer to as Democratic deskilling and this relates

to the fact as your pointing out Scott, which is we saw a recent study from the Washington Post where they tested various models against different political questions to get a sense of the ideological leanings of models and the majority of the models tended to skew toward the left end of that spectrum when answering certain policy questions. Gemini per the Washington Post was neutral in a lot of context, but as the Washington Post-- It's likely a psychophantic in my experience.

But critically, as the Washington Post article notes as flagged by an excellent scholar, what does it even mean to be neutral? Neutral in and of itself is a stance in our political context, and so knowing that that information isn't presented in the same way as let's say a crash test safety rating on a car. You know what kind of car you're getting into and driving and leaving the lot with. When you go ask the sensitive political questions to Gemini or Claude or chatGPT,

you may not have a sense that you are slowly being directed or steered towards certain perspectives and views, and that to me is the sign of that sort of Democratic deskilling that I'm worried about, where people begin to start to just act with us to whatever the model is saying. We know from Pew studies and from the Gallup polls, for example, that while a lot of Americans don't trust AI

“companies, they do trust the AI. And so that sort of willingness to trust the response, I think,”

is particularly worth studying. Now, just to nerd out for one second, because I am trying to make

fetch happen here with this idea of the future of governance studies, which I think is something that we should all as scholars be interested in, which is to say, what does this my program at the Brookings Institution, in the case I went out and I don't think that's exactly what you're talking about, but we're invested in trust as well. There we go. There we go. What does this mean for things like ballot initiatives and referendum? Should we have something like AI parity, where if one

party or one sponsor gets to use the latest and greatest models, do we need to make sure that other parties have access to those same AI tools? Because ultimately, when we think about how this may

I think the guarantee clause needs to start being invoked here, because we are talking about

“Republican governance and Republican governance is contingent upon deliberation. If we don't have”

meaningful deliberation and discourse in our democracy, then I'd argue we're moving away from a Republican form of government, which could be a basis for having more conversations about the guarantee clause. Whoever wants to nerd out about the giant provision lane dormant in our constitution, give me a ring and I'd be happy to nerd out with you. Interesting. It makes me slightly nervous given some of the uses we've seen made of the guarantee clause in the last year too,

but fair point, there's really a broader concern about Republican government and democratic government that comes in a play here. But we are not done with topics today. We have one more need to spend some time on it. Let us shift our focus to that. We have another piece of litigation in the pipeline. Now, as we discussed last week, we know in Tropix, Fable model, the kind of sanitized guard railed version of the mythos model that made briefly publicly available to those

Claude Pro subscribers among us for a brief beautiful 72 hours or so. I mean, not even that long. I don't think 48 hours. They have a high-bush indirectly, but probably not unexpectedly put on it by the Trump administration two weeks ago or less than two weeks ago, where they essentially delivered an export control is informed letter saying, "Hey, you can't share this with foreign nationals because that kept anthropic from even sharing it with its own foreign national employees

“who are essential to maintaining it and maintaining it, safety, according to them." They said,”

"Okay, we just have to pull the model altogether and they've pulled it." It's been remain pulled. And if you go on Claude, now you will see not only the pull, but you have a little info window saying, "It's gone." Here's a question line and it goes to a little explainer. That may be throws a few fairly polite, but nonetheless pointed punches at the administration for what it's doing. Now we're seeing the first lawsuit over this. There's been this big question as to the

administration's ability to impose this sort of export control. It's legal authority to do so. Now we're seeing a first lawsuit over that from a tech startup that was leaning on fable or at least would like to continue to lean on fable to develop its product and deliver its services. Kevin, let me turn to you on this. Talk to us a little bit about this lawsuit. What jumps out to you

“about it? Yeah, so this is a dispute between Legion legal tech, which I hadn't heard of previously,”

but always glad to know of a new AI legal tool and the administration and the challenge here is

really based off of the fact that Legion legal tech to your point Scott claims to have been relying on fable five. I'm not sure how much reliance you could have established in that beautiful 72 hour period, but they're emphasizing that fable five was indeed in their workflow and being used in a business context. And so they are seeking a end to this action and the fact that we have this prohibition on the ability of foreign nationals to access fable five and mythos five

and by extension the world has lost access to mythos five and fable five. So they are challenging the administration's actions on three grounds. First, the idea that there has been an excess of the export control authority allocated to the administration under the ECRA and by extension

under the EAR. So I'm sure we'll get into that in a second. The second would be a challenge

under IEPA. Everyone's favorite emergency law provision and the Berman amendment that is related to IEPA about when IEPA can be used and when it cannot be used with respect to information or information materials. And then third, we have a potential APA challenge arguing that the action was arbitrary and capricious. And so to just walk through those three in slightly more detail, I'll flag that there's a lot of nuance and I love that we'll be able to get scots hot takes on the

ECRA. But when it comes to the idea that this is a action that the administration was authorized to take or to be more precise, the BIS was able to take by issuing the as-enformed letter. Here we've seen a long debate as to whether an export covers something like accessing a model. And in this case, we're seeing Legion legal tech challenging the idea that you can apply a control to something like this accessing just a model given that traditionally an export has referred to something that

is tangible or something that has been explicitly added to the control list. And in this context, we haven't seen that be the case. In fact, Congress is currently debating legislation that would kind of explicitly allow for export controls related to things like remote access to software. And so the challenge here would be, look, the application of the ECRA is not suited to this particular

authority for the administration to be acting in this regard. Likewise, under the second count,

we see that if this is an action that's being justified under IEPA, an exercise of emergency power statutes, IEPA is contingent on recognition of a sort of particular national emergency and a particular threat to national security that emerges in part or wholly from outside of the country. And here there has been no such declaration that this threat is emerging from beyond the country or predominantly from outside the country and through optics of U.S. company. The model is

generally housed within the U.S. So how IEPA would apply here is another challenge that's being based off of a or allegedly an ultra-virus action. And then finally, if there is the ability to challenge this decision under the Administrative Procedure Act, the APA, the argument is that this is arbitrary and capricious. That one I think is going to be a little bit harder to reach because there are a number of bars on what can be challenged under the APA with respect to export control

“decisions. But that's just a quick lay of the land. I think that it's important to note how hard”

it is to win an ultra-virus action. You are going to need to really have a slime dunk case when it comes to making sure that you are showing that the administration has acted without legal authority. So the standard here is that the action must be entirely an excess of delegated powers and contrary to a specific prohibition that is clear and mandatory. So entirely an excess of delegated powers just hanging on that language in and of itself. That is a difficult standard

to reach. And so that's going to be the most difficult part in my opinion for Legion legal tech. Roger, what do you make of this complaint? I think Kevin laid out the key arguments very well and including some of the potential issues with some of them. I'm kind of curious, put from your

“the perspective of me, it looks at a lot of litigation around this. What's motivating this?”

And like, playing this come with these lawsuits a lot of motivations. Obviously, they'd like to get mythos and fable back. I'm kind of curious about how strong you think these arguments are and and insofar as they may not be the strongest. So I may be leaning a little bit towards that direction back and explain why a little bit. Why do you think that the motivation may be for pursuing the sort of lawsuit? Well, I mean, what they say is that the harm is existential for them irreparable

and immediate as Kevin pointed out that they say that Fable 5 is crucial to their development

process and as Kevin pointed out, it was only in existence for three days before before it was taken off the market or forced off the market. Now that could be just the nature of the game now that a crucial AI tool is that important that he talks about the playing if talks about the blistering pace of competition right now. And a tool like this is a game changer and you're competing and it's essential. The judge here is going to be Richard Leon who is 76 and George W. Bush

appointees good judge but he's not Kevin's age and he may look at this, you know how Kevin is. Yeah, my nickname in college was Grandpa. So you know, okay, okay, but you know, it may be hard for him to think that you know a product that's been in existence for three days could become

that crucial that you need a preliminary injunction. The interestingly they did not seek a TRO

a temporary restraining order and then as Kevin also said the standards for proof for a non-stachatory

“ultra-verace action are extremely high. I think the Supreme Court has referred to it as a hail”

Mary action. So all of those it's not an easy case. Another thing on the merits is that the accusation is that there's a jailbreak vulnerability here and the response from anthropic has been well it's a narrow jailbreak and that's sort of fuzzy for especially a judge in my age bracket to understand but there's fascinating things about this suit like the declaration from the CEO the way he speaks he's an engineer himself. Arthur Arthur Rothrock the way he speaks about

in my direct experience Fabel 5 was markedly better than the other models we use it understanding our code base as a whole and at planning and executing large complex feature buildouts reliably it's a it's willingness to sanity check ideas and push back on questionable engineering decisions he

sites he says we need a model that functions as a genuine critical thinking partner rather than one

that merely validates whatever it's told I mean it's it's so amazing to see the the personal terms that he describes this partner that's been taken away from him I mean I don't know how a judge Leon will respond to that but it's it's an uphill battle but it's sort of a fascinating one yeah I agree but but I do think I mean it's right come out on this this is a highly symbolic file like like this is a message sending filing um first like bringing I append this does not make any

sense it gives you a really convenient reason to talk about the burnment amendment and talk about the first amendment which frankly there is this like borderline obsession in the technology cool community that software is speech and that word which is a very broad reading of a very narrow deterrent

decision by a very lower court that does not actually carry the weight I think a lot of people think

it does but has a strong rhetorical weight in a particular community I my sense of this is leaning into this and this is a lawyer's effort to make the that sound as reasonable as you can by pulling into the IEPA not totally unrelated IEPA was used to enforce export controls for years and years and years when there is a lapse in export control statutory authorization that is no longer the case that is the ECRA enacted five or six years ago I can't exactly run off that we had

“2018 was it yeah we would battle off at the time I remember that when it was enacted that provided”

new statutory authorization there is an aburment amendment applicable there are other restrictions some which have similar kind of speech concerns but nothing that general or specific so when you bring that in you really are finding a reason to talk about it and they don't even really say why they think IEPA is involved there are a hundred percent right you would need a national emergency declaration there hasn't been one lots of executive orders about AI I'm not aware of any national emergency

declaration what you would need for IEPA so the predicates just clearly aren't met why would you wait your time you're going to talk about it because you want to talk about speech and draw about just stuff against the wall the ultra viewers action is kind of a concern and frankly the complaints about the export control I mean there is a colorful argument you can make about how far the export control regulations can go but the use of is informed letters isn't new even in the AI space

they've been used for chips and semiconductors it is a little news applied to this I think there's a lot of established practice around the idea that cloud services are not something that's generally subject to this I'm not sure that is a hard required reading of the statute I don't think it is really at least by my preliminary reading but I haven't spent enough time on this to come up with

“the firm opinion on it but I think the key point is here you know the argument is if you're if”

your ground is you need to have really unimpeachable sense to that you're acting outside the scope of the statute I think that's a really high bar to meet in this context when other informations and services are regulated under export controls and there are lots of parallels you can draw to this to things that are regulated even if you might be able to distinguish in certain grounds and there are some policy determinations that cast them down us to whether traditionally you

would view these things as regulatable under that sort of lens Scott to to what extent do you agree with the characterization in the complaint that we saw here the administration effectively skipping steps that usually would be taken before a as informed letter is even issued to what extent do you think that may be persuasive my my quick read or my sense of it as we've talked about and as Roger raised we're seeing that if the standard is this hail Mary standard of ultra-verace action

as you just outlines Scott if there's an argument to be made about how to interpret the statute

“you're going to lose in this context yeah I think that's probably right and I'm just not sure that”

there are sense of the prerequisites for the as informed letters is quite accurate I mean the as

informed letter is an extraordinary measure basically saying hey if something is within the scope

of regulatory authority it gives up fair amount of leeway to the you know executive branch to say hey we're going to send a letter saying well this specific product is subject to this you got to stop doing this the whole idea is to for it to be a kind of emergency measure to say hey we need to move quickly on this and so that belies some of this is something that you're going to have a lot of these strong process behind it now again I want to look at this and I want to think more about

are we confident that this is within the scope of what can be regularly in the scope initially but I don't know I'm not convinced by the rest of this complaint that that argument is well found

it's really a sign that industry really wants this like a lot of people really did like this

product I had to say I used fable for a hot second and I was point impressed I do a lot of like

vibe coding projects for much of data and research and scraping and I was like marked like a substantial felt differently used it in a way that was impressive 70s drivers and blitz yeah exactly I mean I'm

“still very impressed by opus 4.8 which I think is the one I usually end up using it's great”

I'm not because I am like you know torn up on the inside about having not having access to fable but I can see if I were a business that really relied on this for much more sophisticated stuff that I'm doing why I would want it and I think it's just a sign like there's going to be a lot of pressure to get this out there as more industries begin to feel the real competition are going to say

particularly when you see frankly open AI maybe stepping up with their own product and potentially

foreign competitors entering into the space there's going to be this constant drive to say well we need access to the latest model that we can get and once you give people a little taste of it it's going to be hard to kind of pull that back in because they're going to sense about what it could do for them I don't think it's lawsuits going anywhere on that ground but it's a useful messaging

“device it's a useful message to say hey we want access that's going to keep pushing to get it and”

I suspect we're going to see more chatter in this domain if not other lawsuits asserting some of the things even if the legal avenues don't seem super plausible because a lot of this is about messaging and putting political pressure on the officials and it doesn't sound on anthropic to find ways to work with executive branch and get these products back to their subscribers. Roger there's something I'm not sure about as far as I had a different

reading of when I saw the arguments about i.e. in there I don't know how much is known for sure about the bases for the government's bases for this for shutting fabled down or for ordering it off the market and I thought that possibly the plane of here was just saying if it's based on the export control reform act then here are arguments if it's based on i.e. but then here are arguments I thought it was partly just on his part not knowing what the government was going to come back at them

with but I would say that whatever the obviously one of the strengths of the his position is that the suspicious backdrop of all of this the the the the government's hostility to end anthropic over for several months but another complicating factor is that here they seem to want to and maybe this is just a way to try to carve out a small equitable cocoon for themselves that won't create a big problem with the law they want to say that their developers happen to

be Canadian and so they want to say well so these are foreign nationals of an ally as opposed to foreign nationals of an adversary nation making those distinctions is not all that easy especially today it's also only like it comes down to it it seems to be three people you know it's a small company there's two developers in Canada they're expecting a third later this month and then there's him the CEO so it would be a relatively small you could craft a preliminary injunction that was

pretty narrow but I don't know it's a it's a funny case well to piggyback on the earlier point though

“about the jail breaking here I do think it's really important to note that the this kind of jailbreak”

that was allegedly discovered by Amazon is something that's just inherent to the models at this point you don't see that it's technically feasible to eliminate each and every jailbreak what's

critical is that this wasn't the sort of universal jailbreak that would all of the sudden allow

fable five to be used by any bad actor for any purpose and what's really interesting nerdy now for a second on folks like lawnfowler and Waldron and other awesome real-of-law scholars right the basics of the rule of law when we say that phrase we're referring to generality and prospectivity minimally have to be a part of the rule of law which is to say the law should apply to everyone in the same fashion and people should know what the law is in advance of their conduct

and here just to zoom out at a bit of a higher level neither of those has been satisfied because every model has the sort of jailbreak that was allegedly the basis of all of these concerns around fable five and secondarily whether or not you know the as informed letter was applied as intended or as statutorily authorized this shocked everyone no one saw this coming let alone at five twelve p.m. on a Friday during a world cup game that is not how we think through the rule of

law or what we would like to see in this process and so we do need Congress just for any

how a model is going to be evaluated so that we don't have Canadian legal tech companies who are

angry about how and when we enforce our laws just to respond on the jailbreak and and that is of

“course a legal tech's argument if that's a legal legal legal tech but what I think Judge Leon might”

wonder about was if it's so minor why did Amazon go to the White House over it and Amazon is an investor in anthropic and it's also a commercial platform it's enormously allied that will puzzle him as it puzzles me puzzles me to Andy Jassy come on to scaling laws at any point you have an open invite there we go well there's a lot more to this story that's still gonna unravel and I think this litigation is gonna be a part of it if perhaps a small part of it but we'll see because we're

more to come on these fronts in the weeks to come but we are out of time for today's episode

but of course this would not be rational secret if we not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come unfortunately Molly had to step away before the end of this

“week's episode which she sent in her object lesson separately so let us turn to that now”

okay so for my object lesson I am going to take advantage of the fact that I am recording this later than you guys to not adhere as closely to my self-imposed requirement that I bring a physical object as usual and bring something that I can't physically bring because it's too big but it is in my home it's a series of posters created by this Swiss graphic designer

Eric Nietzsche and they are general dynamics posters created in the post-war period they're part

of a campaign called Adams for Peace where General Dynamics was trying to convince the world that actually atomic energy isn't just about blowing things up there are good uses and uses that are in the public interest which I feel is certainly applicable to the AI conversation that we had this episode and also they're just visually pretty cool so I recommend the people check those out Kevin what did you bring for us this week yeah so my object lesson is a nice little bit read

so I highly recommend that folks check out Jillian Hadfield's book rules for a flat world it's an excellent read for anyone who wants to nerd out about what is the purpose of the law where do we derive law from and what sort of norms and evolutionary processes go into how we

“govern society I think it's a really fun read as a lot of folks are analyzing as we nerd it out”

about Scott the the future of governance and how we're going to see legal systems evolve in this fascinating era so definitely check out that book professor Hadfield is a really smart and innovative think around these issues and I just think we need lawyers who are asking bigger bolder questions and she's certainly doing that wonderful wonderful well for my object lesson I'm going to do a little bit of a cop out I think Ben took one of these couple weeks ago I did not come up with a

good object lesson for this week because I'm about to go on vacation so my object lesson this week is that there will not be a rational security next week because I'm going to go on vacation if I'm be honest my brain went ahead and went there a few days in advance um as was prevented me from recalling the object lesson I thought of an hour and a half ago at this particular moment that I failed to write down and for the moment I'm going to pass on that but I hope everyone enjoys

the 4th of July week enjoys the joining 50th anniversary even if you're an ISO brain here in Washington DC which I am getting out of town for a reason perhaps other residents are as well but we will be back with rational security the week after the 4th of July our 250th plus one week anniversary episode so keep tuned for us then but otherwise enjoy your holiday Roger bring us home what do you have for us this week a friend actually a family member gave me a book called The Warriors

of Winter by Olivier Norrec it's about the war between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939 it's about it lasted a little over a hundred days something I knew nothing about and a very brutal war with a hero a sniper for Finland who apparently single-handedly killed more than 500 Soviets or people fighting on behalf of the Soviets but it's it's very reminiscent of the Ukraine war you know it was the David versus Goliath situation and they hit the fact that they held out

for more than a hundred and days shocked the world at the time and probably was one of the reasons

realized but it's quite a fascinating read about something I don't know nothing about

really heroic stand yeah really fascinating really fascinating well that how like a couple of great Beatriz that I will be bailing myself myself perhaps next week when I am on a beach and I'll

like though not really ill beach but whatever I'll take it but until then we are out of time

“that brings us to the end this week's episode but remember rational security is of course a”

production of law fair so be sure to visit us at Lafer Media at Org for our show page for links

to pass episodes for our written work and the written work for the law fair contributors and for

information on Lafer's other phenomenal podcast series while you're at a be sure to follow

“Lafer and social media wherever you socialize your media be sure to leave a rating or review”

wherever you might be listening and designed up to become a material supporter of Lafer on Patreon for an Adfee version of this podcast among other special benefits for more information visit LaferMedia.org/support our audio engineer and producer this week was me of me and our music

“as always was performed by Sophia Jan we were once again edited by the wonderful Jan patcha on”

behalf of my guests Molly Roger and Kevin I am Scott our Anderson and we will talk to you next week till then goodbye Do your current managed services really help run your operations or are they just running in circles running isn't enough anymore with PWC's managed services your operations don't just run they evolve continuously powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows so instead of

maintaining yesterday's model you're building tomorrow's advantage PWC's managed services we run your operations with tech and talent so you can run faster scale smarter lead stronger