The Lawfare Podcast

On August 6, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sat down for a live discussion on Substack with Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a Lawfare contributing editor, about her new piece with Ronald Robertson on Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia. DiResta and Robertson found that Grokipedia’s edit-review queue froze around April 24—with over 13,000 suggestions stuck “in review” and zero resolved in the last three months—with no announcement to users or contributors.
They discuss the methodology of how DiResta and Robertson reconstructed a site-wide activity leaderboard using Grokipedia’s search typeahead, since the site publishes no rankings itself; how a mass rewrite on March 14 broke the anchors linking suggested edits to specific text, retroactively relabeling some accepted edits as “rejected”; and how the new AI information ecosystem is being shaped by out-of-date but open-access resources with no accountability.
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In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Trump administration requesting the Supreme Court stay the district court’s order halting the enforcement of the mail-in voting executive order, updates on where TPS stands following the Supreme Court’s order, developments in the Reflecting Pool prosecution, the D.C. Circuit blocking the ballroom construction and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From February 20, 2025: On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the expansion of facilities at Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants being deported from the United States. It was the latest—and perhaps most aggressive—move to deploy the U.S. military in pursuit of the administration's immigration policies. And it's not at all clear that there's a solid legal basis for doing it. Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and author of a recent piece in Lawfare on this subject, to talk through the legal issues, the administration's strategy, and what it all means for Trump's unconventional use of the military.
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From March 28, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviewed Natan Sachs, the Director of the Middle East Program of the Brookings Institution, to discuss Israel's turbulent domestic situation and the renewal of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. Sachs explains Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political tactics, the controversies over the budget, judicial reform and the resulting protests, and the sacking of figures like Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar. Sachs also discusses why Israel has decided to renew operations in Gaza and Lebanon and why strikes on Iran are more likely than in the past.
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Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, joins Kevin Frazier, Director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at Texas Law and Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail his policy recommendation—AI 2040: Plan A. It’s a thorough analysis of a policy pathway to delaying superintelligence, which Daniel and his co-authors think is necessary to ensure that the disruptive effects of highly-capable AI systems do not outweigh the benefits.
Kevin asks Daniel to explain scenario scrutiny, address feedback from other AI policy stakeholder such as Tom Davidson, and detail what led him to already alter his estimation of how likely it is that policymakers adopt Plan A.
Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.
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