Compiled by Athena Smith.
Articles
The AI Model Distillation Paradox
Lisa Klaassen argued that the U.S. government defends American artificial intelligence labs for training models on copyrighted work while branding Chinese labs a national security threat for distilling American models. Klaassen explained that these two positions cannot both be true, and Washington has yet to settle whether model outputs are legally protected.
Both propositions cannot hold simultaneously. Either the outputs of these systems are protectable under the law, in which case the writers, musicians, artists, and programmers whose work American models were built on can hold a claim that the Justice Department has denied. Or they are not, in which case the six Chinese laboratories accused of “malicious and targeted” distillation attacks have not done anything that Elon Musk has not freely admitted to under oath, without consequence.
The Cyber Corps: Ukraine’s Least Understood Cyber Actor
Stefan Soesanto described connections between Ukraine’s military intelligence service (GUR) and a hacktivist group calling itself the Cyber Corps. Soesanto outlined a pattern of circumstantial evidence—linking the GUR to the Cyber Corps—including the Cyber Corps’ selective claiming of GUR-linked operations and its absorption of members of the volunteer IT Army of Ukraine, that collectively suggests a relationship between the two organizations.
Taken individually, each observation laid out in this article is open to plausible alternative explanations. Collectively, however, the evidence paints a different picture. The Cyber Corps consistently claimed a defined subset of GUR-linked cyber operations, published operational details that extended beyond official GUR information releases, repeatedly overlapped operationally with the GUR and the IT Army, was linked to GUR operations in multiple Ukrainian media reports citing intelligence sources, and ultimately absorbed experienced IT Army members.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: Gulf Countries Hedging Amid Iran War Debacle: Julia Curlee sat down with Shawn Howard and Ariane Tabatabai to consider how the Gulf states are coping with a war they didn’t start: the Iran War. They discussed why U.S. protection has made the Gulf states targets, how Tehran sees them, Iran’s strikes on the mediators, the possibility of a United Arab Emirates side deal, and what a post-midterm return to U.S. bombing would mean for the region.
Rational Security: The “Too Much Molly” Edition:Scott Anderson sat down with Benjamin Wittes, Molly Roberts, and Molly Reynolds to talk through the week’s big national security news, including the White House’s pocket rescission of federal funding appropriated by Congress, the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape U.S. elections, an incident of plague at a biological research institute in Siberia, and more.
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