On Lawfare Daily, Roger Parloff spoke with Lee Gelernt about two upcoming D.C. Circuit arguments Gelernt will be making relating to the March 15, 2025, removals of 137 Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.
On Lawfare Live, Friday, Sept. 25, at 4 p.m. ET, Benjamin Wittes sat down with Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration, including President Trump’s bans on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, updates in third-country removal litigation, and more.
On Rational Security, Scott Anderson sat down with Natalie Orpett and Julia Curlee to discuss Chinese President Xi Jinping’s summit with Donald Trump, the U.S.-Denmark-Greenland agreement, this week’s annual high-level session of the UN General Assembly in New York, and more.
On Lawfare Daily from last week’s Lawfare Live, Wittes sat down with Roberts, Bower, Parloff, and Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration, including Trump’s threat to demolish the Kennedy Center, the Supreme Court’s refusal to stay the injunction against the executive order targeting mail voting, and more.
Reed Shaw discussed how the new rule proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) would lock in a hands-off approach to review of prediction market contracts from platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Shaw argued that this rule is inconsistent with administrative law, abdicates the CFTC’s responsibility to keep the public safe, and prevents these prediction platforms from future scrutiny.
Ema Rose Schumer described how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit struck down a law Puerto Rico passed during the coronavirus pandemic which criminalized the spread of so-called fake news during states of emergency. Schumer explained that the First Circuit’s decision reaffirmed that First Amendment protections hold even during crises and that counter-speech is the preferred constitutional remedy for lies.
On Lawfare Daily, Peter Harrell sat down with Emily Benson to discuss what economic security actually is and how we should think about it. The two considered whether Europe needs to diversify away from U.S. technology because of U.S.-related economic security risks. They also discussed China and how the U.S. and China are wielding economic security tools against each other.
Mykhailo Soldatenko explained that we can better understand the future of United Nations’ Charter Article 2(4) by using the Cuban missile crisis as a case study. Soldatenko argued that international law did not meaningfully constrain the Kennedy administration during the standoff, but U.S. officials did care to justify American actions in legal terms to partners and allies.
Joy Gordon examined the impact of the latest round of U.S. sanctions on Cuba. Gordon described how U.S. sanctions have created an economic and humanitarian crisis in Cuba through their combined impact, preventing fuel deliveries, driving out foreign trade and investment, and precluding Cuba from bringing revenue into the country.
Orpett sat down with Ariane Tabatabai and Curlee to discuss the ongoing war in Iran. The group explored where the conflict stands today, how the gutting of the national security apparatus in Washington has affected the way the government is waging the war, and more.
On Lawfare Daily, Daniel Byman sat down with Gregory Johnsen to discuss the latest developments in the war in Yemen, the reasons for the Houthis' successes so far, the dilemmas facing Saudi Arabia, and why the situation has gone from bad to worse.
Eugenio Benincasa reviewed Ahana Datta Fasel’s book, “Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US-China Competition,” which traces U.S.-China cyber espionage across the three levels of tradecraft, statecraft, and instability. Benincasa explored the book’s useful “upstairs-downstairs” approach, which illustrated both top-level geopolitical decisions and the substructure of hackers operationalizing them, but also noted that the book’s broad scope led to some overreach.
Justin Sherman argued that the FBI data breach is a potential counterintelligence nightmare, exposing thousands of FBI personnel to profiling and foreign intelligence targeting—and, more broadly, to doxing and even violent retribution from threat actors ranging from foreign adversaries to domestic extremists. Sherman explained that the FBI and the U.S. government first need to verify the authenticity of the incident and understand its scope before taking both cyber and physical security measures to mitigate the harm to impacted employees.
In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren explored Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s argument that frontier artificial intelligence (AI) labs should not be exempt from liability amid hacks by rogue AI, how Chinese and Russian hackers are putting AI to different uses—with China diversifying its malware to complicate attribution and Russia cyberattacks are using AI to automate operations and evading detection—, and more.
Jason Healey and Michael Daniel described how a flood of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vulnerabilities demands will change the U.S. vulnerabilities equities process (VEP). Daniel and Healey noted that the VEP cannot handle the volume of vulnerabilities government researchers can now find using AI tools, and they recommended that policymakers put VEP on hiatus until the impacts of AI are clearer.
On Scaling Laws, Kevin Frazier sat down with Chloé Bakalar to discuss the purposes of political constitutions, who writes AI constitutions, and to what degree AI constitutions can meaningfully constrain AI systems.
Cristian Trout, Rune Kvist, and Rajiv Dattani argued that a mutual insurance company owned by the frontier AI companies it covers could reduce the growing risks of frontier AI. Because each member would pay into a shared fund that covers harm caused by any member, the authors explained, members would have a direct stake in one another’s safety practices, giving the mutual the incentive and leverage to set safety standards, commission third-party audits and evaluations, and suspend coverage for members that fail to fix serious risks.
Keshav Narayan explained how New York’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety and Education (RAISE) Act allows the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) to share critical safety reports with other entities. The RAISE Act’s coordination with the NYDFS can serve as a channel for states to share frontier AI safety reports confidentially, revealing some of a frontier AI’s biggest risks before it goes public.
And Ignacio Cofone analyzed a German regional court’s ruling that Google’s Artificial Intelligence Overviews are Google’s own statements. He argued that the decision signals a shift toward holding AI providers responsible for what their models generate, and that its reasoning will likely extend beyond defamation to other false and harmful AI-generated statements.
And that was the week that was.
