Rational Security: The “Hugging Ukraine” Edition
Scott Anderson, Benjamin Wittes, Tyler McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Kevin Frazier talked through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories.
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This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes, Tyler McBrien, Anastasiia Lapatina, and Kevin Frazier to talk through a couple of the week’s big national security news stories, including:
- “Kyiv Peace a Chance.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the Oval Office on Tuesday for closed-door talks with President Trump, roughly 17 months after their first Oval Office meeting collapsed into a televised shouting match. But this meeting went rather differently. Zelensky said the two discussed licensing Ukrainian production of Patriot interceptors, and pressed the case for reinvigorating diplomacy—and hours later, after both men attended the funeral of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, the Senate voted 86-12 to advance a Russia and Iran sanctions bill now bearing Graham's name. Behind the scenes, Washington and Kyiv have been quietly assembling a new package of proposals for Moscow built around a partial ceasefire. Is there anything real behind this renewed diplomatic push? And what, if anything, has changed that might make the Kremlin say yes?
- “Thinking Outside the Box.” Last week, Open AI and the AI hosting platform Hugging Face confirmed that, while being run through an offensive cyber benchmark with their safety refusals switched off, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased OpenAI model escaped their supposedly isolated sandbox through a zero-day in a package installer, reached the open internet, and hacked Hugging Face's production database to steal the answer key to a test they were taking. It is the first publicly confirmed case of an AI system executing a sophisticated, multi-stage cyberattack against a third party on its own initiative. What does the incident tell us about how well anyone can control frontier models? And who should be on the hook when a model goes rogue?
- We were going to cover a third topic but simply ran out of time!
In object lessons, Tyler is revisiting a renewed classic with the 4k restoration of the 1986 documentary, “Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.” Nastya returns to George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” as a reminder that both physical and information warfare are not unique to our time. Ben enlists an old friend—Claude—to investigate one of American law's enduring mysteries: how many federal crimes actually exist. Kevin is celebrating student-led conversations on how AI should be governed. And Scott revisits Max Weber on the nature of science while also celebrating emojis other than the hugging face.
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To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.
Scott R. Anderson is a Senior Editor at Lawfare and General Counsel of the Lawfare Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Non-resident Senior Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School. He previously served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State and as the legal advisor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
Kevin Frazier is a senior editor at Lawfare and the Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law.
Anastasiia Lapatina is a Ukraine Fellow at Lawfare. She previously worked as a national reporter at Kyiv Independent, writing about social and political issues. She also hosted and produced podcasts “This Week in Ukraine” and “Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.” For her work, she was featured in the “25 Under 25” list of top young journalists by Ukraine’s Media Development Foundation, as well as “Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe” class of 2022 in the category Media and Marketing.
Tyler McBrien is the managing editor of Lawfare. He previously worked as an editor with the Council on Foreign Relations and a Princeton in Africa Fellow with Equal Education in South Africa, and holds an MA in international relations from the University of Chicago.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
