Scaling Laws

Nils Tracy, founder of Authorship, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to detail the challenges and solutions to deploying AI in highly sensitive contexts.Authorship enables users to map their AI policies to myriad use cases--from on-device AI tools to those connected to the cloud. It's a direct effort to tackle concerns that as AI use cases become more frequent and varied deployers may struggle to ensure compliance with key policies and laws. 

Joe Seddon, Founder and CEO of Zero Gravity, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior fellow at the Abundance Institute, to discuss AI, social mobility, higher education, and the future of opportunity. Zero Gravity is a UK-based platform that helps launch students from low-opportunity backgrounds into leading universities and prosperous careers. The conversation explores whether AI can scale the kinds of mentorship, admissions advice, tutoring, and career guidance that have historically been available only to students with strong networks. The two also examine the future of elite credentials, the role of universities in preparing students for an AI-transformed labor market, and whether AI will disrupt entry-level white-collar work in ways that require new approaches to retraining, apprenticeships, and lifelong learning.

Adi Tantravahi, founder of Cofactor, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to talk about how AI can help cut through the administrative red tape that underlies and, in many ways, undermines the modern healthcare system.Cofactor’s AI platform focuses on denial management—an area where hospitals routinely lose revenue because insurance claims go unchallenged due to staffing constraints. Kevin and Adi unpack the economics of healthcare billing, why administrative overhead has grown so dramatically in American medicine, and how AI systems capable of autonomously managing appeals and reimbursement workflows might reshape the financial infrastructure of hospitals.

Andy Masley joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, and Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare and associate professor at Minnesota Law, to unpack the increasingly contentious issues related to data centers.They discuss Andy’s efforts to challenge what he sees as misleading claims about data center water use, land use, electricity rates, and local community impacts. Be sure to check out Andy’s substack here.

Kal Clark, co-founder of Zauron Labs, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to explain how AI is already reducing diagnostic errors in radiology.Kal details how Zauron’s AI system functions as a second-look safety layer, reviewing imaging exams for high-impact missed findings before those results translate into patient outcomes.Kal and Kevin then discuss the scale of diagnostic error in modern healthcare, the institutional barriers that have prevented systematic second reviews, and how open-source AI models combined with on-premise deployment might allow hospitals to build their own diagnostic intelligence while protecting patient data.

Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota and research director at Lawfare, and Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John's University School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare, spoke with science fiction novelist and technology journalist Cory Doctorow about about his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, which argues that AI is being deployed to turn workers into "reverse centaurs" who serve machines rather than direct them, and that the economics of the AI industry add up to an unsustainable bubble. The conversation covered the distinction between centaurs and reverse centaurs in automation theory; why Doctorow thinks the AI business loses money on every customer and can't pencil out; whether the AI boom is a "productive residue" bubble like the dot-com fiber glut or a pure value-destroyer like crypto; how AI has fused with the state and the stock market, raising the prospect of a slow deflation rather than a clean crash; whether statistical inference can ever amount to genuine understanding; AI's effect on labor, from warehouse injury rates to the burden of "marking the AI's homework"; AI art and the problem of intention; security risks like "slop squatting"; and the threat of knowledge collapse and what it means for the future of education.

Dhruv Diddi, founder of Solo Tech, joins Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, to discuss the emerging frontier of Physical AI. Solo Tech builds infrastructure that allows developers to deploy AI models directly onto robots and edge devices rather than relying on cloud-based computation. In other words, think about allowing AI systems to operate in remote areas that have traditionally struggled to leverage the latest and greatest tech.Kevin and Dhruv look into what it takes to move AI systems out of digital environments and into the physical world. They also chat about the idea of "gyms" for AI and policy challenges associated with highly-sophisticated robots becoming more ubiquitious. 

Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare, spoke with Robert Wright—author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True, and the writer behind the NonZero Newsletter and podcast—about his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which argues that AI is an evolutionary threshold on the scale of the entire history of life, that we are collectively failing to grasp its magnitude, and that rising to the challenge will require both new forms of international governance and an expansion of human moral and cognitive perspective. The conversation covered the multiple meanings of the book's title and what it means to view AI from a "cosmic" perspective; whether the public is finally starting to "feel the AGI" and where skepticism about AI's capabilities now comes from; how large language models are trained and Wright's claim that we have built "machines that create machines that think"; whether these systems genuinely understand, what Searle's Chinese Room and Nagel's "what is it like to be a bat?" have to do with it, and the open question of AI moral patienthood; the two families of AI risk—bad actors empowered by AI versus AI itself going rogue—and why the near-term disruption to jobs, relationships, and security may matter most; the "But China!" argument against AI regulation, China hawkishness, and why Wright thinks racing toward superintelligence is dangerously destabilizing; the case for "global governance" over "world government" and the perils of concentrating AI power at home; and why a book about AI and geopolitics closes with a call for mindfulness, cognitive empathy, and transcending the psychology of tribalism.

In this cross-pod episode, Alan and Kevin join Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin of Justified Posteriors to explore a big question: what should AI be for?The conversation begins with Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical. The group discusses how economists should think about the Church’s role in AI debates, what counts as an AI-related market failure, whether moral and religious institutions can help address social harms, and whether such interventions risk crowding out private action or local experimentation.The episode then turns to the emerging idea of positive alignment. A recent paper, Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing, argues that AI alignment has focused too heavily on negative alignment—preventing harms such as manipulation, bias, dangerous outputs, and misuse—and should also ask how AI systems can actively support autonomy, wisdom, truth-seeking, pluralism, and human flourishing.