Rational Security: The “Worlds Colliding” Edition
Scott Anderson, Kevin Frazier, Roger Parloff, and Ariane Tabatabai talked through the week’s big national security news stories.
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This week, Scott sat down with his colleagues Lawfare Senior Editors Kevin Frazier and Roger Parloff, and Lawfare Contributing Editor and Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ariane Tabatabai, to talk through the week’s big national security news stories, including:
- “P(doom) and Gloom.” Last week, a wonky corner of the tech world became national news when Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher, resigned from Anthropic and posted a viral thread accusing his employer and its rival OpenAI of racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” His warning was quickly amplified by current Anthropic staff—and, days later, by CEO Dario Amodei himself, who published a lengthy essay urging the industry to slow down, drawing rare public agreement from Sam Altman and Elon Musk, a slide in AI stocks, and fresh calls for regulation in Washington. Is this the moment AI-safety fears finally broke into the mainstream? And should the rest of us be as worried as the people building these systems say they are?
- “Trains, Planes, and Provocations.” Tensions along NATO’s eastern flank are spiking over an increasing number of Russian provocations in and near NATO territory relating to the Ukraine conflict. Recent examples have included an explosives-laden drone at a German airport, another drone shot down in Lithuanian airspace, and repeated incursions into Poland and Romania related to border and port facilities adjacent to Ukraine. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte pledged to bolster the alliance’s defenses and insisted the West won’t be “scared” off of supporting Kyiv, even as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the coming months could bring intensified Russian action and possible spillover onto NATO soil. Is this a deliberate campaign by Russia to test and divide the alliance? And how much escalation risk does it actually carry?
- “Seeking the Plane Truth.” On September 29, the full D.C. Circuit will hear en banc arguments in what may be one of the most consequential rule-of-law fights of Trump’s second term: whether Chief Judge James Boasberg may investigate who in the administration defied his March 2025 order to turn around planes carrying Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act. While Boasberg found probable cause for criminal contempt, panels dominated by Trump appointees have twice blocked him from doing so—with the Justice Department, whose own senior officials are reportedly implicated in some of the relevant discussions, arguing that all a judge may do is refer the matter to the Department itself to decide whether to investigate and prosecute. What is really at stake when the branch accused of contempt gets to decide whether anyone is charged? And how is the full court likely to rule?
In object lessons, Kevin is putting the “community” in community college with high praise for the AI Literacy initiative in Alabama. Roger seams to think that the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum in London is knot your average exhibit. Scott finds weekend mornings watching Hilda with his kids to be a magical, enchanted adventure. And Ari is decidedly not in the Middle of Nowhere with her love for the new Kacey Musgraves album.
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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.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
Ariane Tabatabai is the Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a contributing editor at Lawfare. Previously, she served in a number of roles in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense, including as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Education and Training. She is the author of "No Conquest" and "No Defeat" and co-author of "Triple Axis – Iran’s Relations with Russia and China."
