Compiled by Sarah Willrich.
Articles
Why We’re Suing the State Department Over International Agreements
Scott R. Anderson discussed Lawfare’s decision to sue the State Department over its failure to release documentation of its international agreements. Anderson broke down what the lawsuit alleges, why *Lawfare *decided the suit was necessary, recent litigation developments, and what comes next.
This collapse of the disclosure system mandated by Congress presents some very specific problems for
Lawfare. Over the past two years,Lawfarehas covered and analyzed countless aspects of the Trump administration’s foreign policy that hinge on international agreements or non-binding instruments, from the deportation of migrants to third countries to new deals with trading partners to arrangements with Ukraine regarding its natural resources. But because of the Trump administration’s non-compliance, we’ve been forced to do so without the documents themselves or an understanding of their purported legal basis. This undoubtedly makes it more difficult for us to fulfill our stated mission of better educating the public on matters of national security law and policy. It also directly undermines Congress’s stated legislative purpose of promoting “greater understanding of the use of international accords as a foreign policy tool.”
America Must Protect Its Training Data
Ibrahim Dagher explained that the development of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models relies on purchasing training environments created by U.S. firms. He argued that by restricting such sales, China’s AI development could be slowed and U.S. firms’ competitive edge maintained.
Years of these feedback loops have concentrated institutional know-how in a few key vendors. By one industry count, more than 75 percent of this market belongs to just four U.S. companies. It’s simply too costly to switch away from the firms with this know-how: Epoch AI, after interviewing 18 practitioners across the industry, concluded that “maintaining quality while scaling is the number one bottleneck …. Finding the experts isn’t that hard, but managing them and doing quality control is hard.” A former Google reinforcement-learning researcher, Auriel Wright, was blunter about what happens when a vendor gets it wrong: “Researchers don’t want your broken RL environments because they will make our models worse.” Buying low-quality data means the model learns the wrong things and the training run has to be thrown away.
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily** : Mike Schmidt Talks CHIPS and U.S. Industrial Policy: **On the first episode of the
Videos and Webinars
Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, September 4: Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss Judge Boasberg’s denial of the government’s motion to dismiss Lawfare’s suit seeking information on international agreements; developments in President Trump’s targeting of mail voting; updates in litigation over the Triumphal Arch; and more.
Scaling Laws: Algorithmic Disgorgement with Christina Lee: Christina Lee joined Kevin Frazier to discuss Lee’s forthcoming article, “Beyond Algorithmic Disgorgement: Remedying Algorithmic Harms.” They considered what algorithmic disgorgement is, why the Federal Trade Commission first used it, why its expansion matters, and whether alternate approaches could work.
Announcements
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