Rational Security: The “Worlds Colliding” Edition

About this episode

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 inc