Compiled by Sarah Willrich.
Articles
The ‘Covered List’: A Fraud Claimed ‘National Security’
Nicholas Weaver explained how the Federal Communications Commission’s covered list, an effective ban on purchasing certain equipment from foreign providers, evolved from a limited national security tool under President Biden to an overly broad ban on critical goods. Weaver argued that the executive is given broad deference in creating the list, enabling the Trump administration to use it to block access to cheap parts and favor administration allies, ultimately harming national security.
For example, if the U.S. military wants recruits already familiar with first-person view drones, it needs a civilian population that can buy the latest (Chinese-made) drones at Costco—that is how you get service members who understand the technology before they enlist. And for the vast majority of drone flights, the data exposure is trivial: The CCP is welcome to watch me inspect my roof for fallen leaves with my DJI mini; in this case, BCC-the-CCP is an acceptable (and for me indeed explicitly articulated) feature I tolerate in return for a quality drone that costs far less.
Open-Weight Diplomacy: How China’s AI Models Are Rerunning the Digital Silk Road
Chinmayi Sharma compared how China’s artificial intelligence (AI) companies are providing their open-weight models abroad to the country’s previous buildout of telecommunications networks. While China may be repeating its playbook, Sharma argued that Washington should not. She explained that attempts to restrict the spread of AI models, as the U.S. did with Huawei products, would not only be ineffective but risk preventing the U.S. from providing a competitive counteroffer to countries eager to adopt AI technologies.
Twenty years later, China’s open-weight AI models are sparking debates that echo the concerns the telecom buildout raised: How does the majority world access an indispensable technology without surrendering sovereignty, or in other words, without trading access today for dependency tomorrow?
China’s playbook appears virtually identical to its telecom strategy. Its AI buildout involves many of the same companies, the same countries, and the same vocabulary as its broadband strategy. And open weights play the role subsidized equipment once did: They are the keystone to an indispensable new technology that one country can provide to another virtually for free to get a foot in the door, but they are also useless without the intricate, interconnected stack of other components that, conveniently, are far more expensive.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: Peter Salib on the Legal and Policy Ramifications of the OpenAI-Hugging Face Postmortems: Peter Salib joined Kevin Frazier to break down the postmortems on OpenAI’s failure to contain AI agents undergoing testing, which resulted in a hack of Hugging Face. The duo discussed the timeline of what exactly transpired and explored the technical reasons and policy decisions that allowed the hack to transpire. They then reflect on what that means for the broader AI evaluation ecosystem.
Rational Security: The “Whale of a Tale” Edition: Scott Anderson sat down with Molly Roberts, Eric Columbus, and Renée DiResta to talk through the week’s big domestic news stories, including President Trump’s efforts to reshape mail-in voting, Meta’s landmark settlement in a child-safety lawsuit against the company, the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the White House ballroom construction to continue, and more.
Videos and Webinars
Lawfare Live** : The Trials of the Trump Administration, September 4: **On Friday, Sept. 4, at 4 p.m. ET,
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