The Lawfare Podcast - The Lawfare Institute

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Lawfare Daily: The Policy Implications of the AI Vibe Shift Sep 29, 2026

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Lawfare Senior Editor Kevin Frazier is joined by Scaling Laws co-host Assemblyman Alex Bores of New York, AVERI Director of U.S. Policy Nat Purser, and Institute of Law and AI Managing Director of U.S. Law Mackenzie Arnold to discuss recent developments in the AI risk environment, what led us here, and what comes next for domestic and AI foreign policy. They also touch on other major pieces of AI news including President Trump’s announcement of an “AI Force” and an AI Czar, projections for the September 24 U.S.-China Summit, and other recent developments.

If you want to catch up on some of the major incidents driving the vibe shift, check out the podcast, “Lawfare Daily: Peter Salib on the Legal and Policy Ramifications of the OpenAI-Hugging Face Postmortems.”

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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, September 25 Sep 28, 2026

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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff discussed the D.C. Circuit rejecting Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon’s exclusion of Claude from its supply chain, the Supreme Court allowing the Department of Homeland Security to use the SAVE database with social security information, DHS requesting the Supreme Court allow third country removals, a permanent injunction issued regarding overcrowded immigration detention centers, 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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Lawfare Archive: Mikhail Zygar on Putin, the Russia-Ukraine War, and Press Freedom Sep 27, 2026

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From April 23, 2025: On today's episode, Mikhail Zygar, a renowned Russian journalist living in exile in the U.S. and the author of multiple books on Vladimir Putin, joined Lawfare Associate Editor Olivia Manes to discuss his experience as the founder of one of the last independent Russian media channels, TV Rain. They talked about the incentives underlying Putin's actions in Ukraine, how the Russian president has clamped down on independent journalism, global disillusionment with liberal democracy, and more.

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Lawfare Archive: Robert Mahari on Addictive Intelligence, Digital Attachment Disorders, and Other AI-related Concerns Sep 26, 2026

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From October 1, 2024: Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to explain how increased use of AI agents may lead humans to form troublingly and even addictive relationships with artificial systems. Robert also shares the significance of his research on common uses of existing generative AI systems. This interview builds on Robert’s recent piece in the MIT Tech Review, which he co-authored with Pat Pataranutaporn.

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Lawfare Daily: Iran War Update—and How We Got Here Sep 25, 2026

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On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett is joined by Ariane Tabatabai and Julia Curlee. Ari is Vice President of Research, Security and Defense at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare, and Julia Curlee is a Public Service Fellow at Lawfare. They talk about the war in Iran: where things stand today, and how we got here—including how the gutting of the national security apparatus in Washington affected the way the war is being waged by Tehran.

Ari and Julia's Foreign Policy piece is available here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/09/trump-iran-deep-state-purges-intelligence-bureaucracy/?utm_content=gifting&tpcc=gifting_article&gifting_article=dHJ1bXAtaXJhbi1kZWVwLXN0YXRlLXB1cmdlcy1pbnRlbGxpZ2VuY2UtYnVyZWF1Y3JhY3k=&pid=PNIGUh1udtg297d

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Rational Security: “The Right Kind of American for Rational Security” Edition Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee to talk through the week’s big news in national security, including:

"The Xi-Quel." This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for a three-day state visit—his first to the U.S. capital in more than a decade, and the second Trump-Xi summit of 2026 after the president’s own trip to Beijing in May. The pageantry will be considerable: Trump plans to greet Xi personally at Joint Base Andrews, followed by a Rose Garden honor guard, a bilateral meeting, and a state dinner. But the substance is heavier than the ceremony. With a 90-day tariff truce set to expire on November 10, China’s rare-earth export controls hanging over global supply chains, a pending $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, and questions about Beijing’s economic lifeline to Iran, the two leaders face a crowded and contentious agenda. What can we actually expect from this summit? Is anyone anticipating a breakthrough—or just a managed continuation of what one analyst called a “managed stalemate”?
"A Fjord in the Road." On Friday, President Trump announced that the United States, Denmark, and Greenland had reached an agreement giving Washington what he described as “permanent control over security, and all other needs” in Greenland—capping a year of tension in which Trump had repeatedly threatened to take the Arctic island by economic or even military force. Denmark and Greenland insist the deal respects Greenlandic sovereignty and territorial integrity even as it clears the way for a major expansion of the U.S. military footprint and bars adversaries like Russia and China from establishing bases or making “sensitive investments” there without U.S. approval. Does the deal really give Trump the “permanent control” he is touting? And how did a standoff that once looked like an existential crisis for a NATO ally end up here?
"Contempt of Court." World leaders are gathering in New York this week for the annual high-level session of the UN General Assembly. In his speech before the body, President Trump reiterated a number of standard talking points, notably claiming to be a peacemaker even as he again threatened Iran with annihilation. But his administration may be planning something more dramatic: according to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, the administration has drafted sanctions measures targeting the entire International Criminal Court—not just individual judges and prosecutors, as before—that could aim to cut the Hague-based tribunal off from the global financial system. The implications reach well beyond The Hague, raising hard questions about the weaponization of dollar dominance and the geoeconomic fallout for the banks, contractors, and allied governments that deal with the court. What is Washington trying to accomplish at Turtle Bay—and at what cost?

In object lessons, Natalie, following in the footsteps of others before, has found a heartwarming use for AI, relatively speaking. Scott continues to nerd out over treaty law and the museums that love it. And Julia has a slightly less uplifting AI story—but one that could come with merch!

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Lawfare Daily: The Houthi War Against Saudi Arabia Sep 24, 2026

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For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Gregory Johnsen, non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf State Institute, to discuss the current war in Yemen.

The two discuss the latest developments in the war, the reasons for the Houthis' successes so far, the dilemmas facing Saudi Arabia, and why the situation has gone from bad to worse.

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Lawfare Daily: Emily Benson on What Economic Security Is, and How We Should Think About It Sep 23, 2026

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Emily Benson is the Head of Strategy at Minerva Technology Futures, a strategic consulting firm that advises companies on how geopolitics impacts their business. She has also spent time at CSIS and at the Department of Commerce, and has spent more time thinking about economic statecraft than most of us.

Emily joins Lawfare Contributing Editor and host of the Security Economics podcast Peter Harrell to discuss what economic security actually is and how we should think about it. She recently moved to Europe, and that gives her an interesting perspective on the issue, including whether Europe needs to diversify away from U.S. technology because of U.S.-related economic security risks. They also discuss China and how the U.S. and China are wielding economic security tools against each other.

This episode is part of the Security Economics podcast series, in which Peter Harrell and guests explore the intersection of economics and national security, how countries manage their economies to support national security, and how they deploy economic tools in support of geopolitical objectives.

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Lawfare Daily: Two Appeals Concerning Alien Enemies Act Removals in Apparent Defiance of a Court Order Sep 22, 2026

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Lee Gelernt, the chief ACLU litigator on Alien Enemies Act cases, speaks to Senior Editor Roger Parloff about two upcoming DC Circuit arguments he’ll be making relating to the March 15, 2025, removals of 137 Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.

In one, the en banc court will grapple with whether to permit Judge James Boasberg to conduct fact-finding on whether to seek contempt charges against high-level Trump administration officials, including current Attorney General Todd Blanche and current U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Emil Bove.

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Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, September 18 Sep 21, 2026

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In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the First Circuit rejecting the Trump administration’s third country deportation policy, former fugitive ICE agent jailed in Minnesota, oral argument in the Fourth Circuit over the dismissal of the first indictment against James Comey, 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.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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