Scaling Laws: Caleb Withers on the Cybersecurity Frontier in the Age of AI
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Caleb Withers, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, 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 how frontier models shift the balance in favor of attackers in cyberspace. The two discuss how labs and governments can take steps to address these asymmetries favoring attackers, and the future of cyber warfare driven by AI agents. Jack Mitchell, a student fellow in the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law, provided excellent research assistance on this episode.
Check out Caleb’s recent research here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nearly every news alert in 2025 has raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security. |
| 0:07.5 | And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly. It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. |
| 0:18.3 | You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-8474. Or by sending a |
| 0:27.7 | recording of yourself asking your question to Ask Us Anything Lawfare at gmail.com by December 16th. |
| 0:36.7 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Alan Rosenstein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, and a senior editor and research director at Lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different, an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law, where we're |
| 0:54.9 | tackling the most important AI and policy questions, from new legislation on Capitol Hill |
| 0:59.5 | to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs. We cut through the hype to get you |
| 1:04.1 | up to speed on the rules, standards, and ideas shaping the future of this pivotal technology. |
| 1:09.3 | If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to scaling laws |
| 1:12.4 | wherever you get your podcasts, |
| 1:14.1 | and follow us on X and Blue Sky. |
| 1:16.0 | Thanks for listening. |
| 1:21.2 | When the AI overlords take over, |
| 1:28.8 | what are you most excited about? |
| 1:31.4 | It's not crazy. It's just smart. |
| 1:35.7 | And just this year, in the first six months, there have been something like a thousand laws. |
| 1:41.1 | Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it? AI only works if society lets it work. |
| 1:43.9 | There are so many questions have to be figured out. |
| 1:47.1 | Nobody came to my bonus class. |
| 1:48.8 | Let's enforce the rules of the road. |
| 1:52.8 | Welcome back to scaling laws, the podcast brought to you by Lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law that explores the intersection of AI, policy, and of course, |
| 2:01.6 | the law. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law, and a senior editor at |
... |
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