Scaling Laws: Can AI Make AI Regulation Cheaper?, with Cullen O'Keefe and Kevin Frazier
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alan Rozenshtein, research director at Lawfare, spoke with Cullen O'Keefe, research director at the Institute for Law & AI, and Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and senior editor at Lawfare, about their paper, "Automated Compliance and the Regulation of AI" (and associated Lawfare article), which argues that AI systems can automate many regulatory compliance tasks, loosening the trade-off between safety and innovation in AI policy.
The conversation covered the disproportionate burden of compliance costs on startups versus large firms; the limitations of compute thresholds as a proxy for targeting AI regulation; how AI can automate tasks like transparency reporting, model evaluations, and incident disclosure; the Goodhart's Law objection to automated compliance; the paper's proposal for "automatability triggers" that condition regulation on the availability of cheap compliance tools; analogies to sunrise clauses in other areas of law; incentive problems in developing compliance-automating AI; the speculative future of automated compliance meeting automated governance; and how co-authoring the paper shifted each author's views on the AI regulation debate.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. |
| 0:23.2 | Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. |
| 0:26.4 | That's lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event for details and to register. |
| 0:35.3 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 0:37.4 | I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a senior editor at Lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different. It's an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. Scaling Laws is a creation of lawfare and Texas law. It has a pretty simple |
| 0:56.8 | aim, but a huge mission. We cover the most important AI and law policy questions that are top |
| 1:03.2 | of mind for everyone from Sam Altman to Senators on the Hill to folks like you. We dive deep |
| 1:09.4 | into the weeds of new laws, various proposals, and what the labs are up to |
| 1:14.0 | to make sure you're up to date on the rules and regulations, standards, and ideas that are |
| 1:19.4 | shaping the future of this pivotal technology. |
| 1:22.2 | If that sounds like something you're going to be interested in and are hunches it is, |
| 1:26.2 | you can find scaling laws wherever |
| 1:28.2 | you subscribe to podcasts. You can also follow us on X and Blue Sky. Thank you. |
| 1:37.5 | When the AI overlords take over, what are you most excited about? It's not crazy. It's just smart. |
| 1:43.8 | And just this year, in the first six months, there have been something like a thousand laws. |
| 1:48.3 | Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it? |
| 1:53.5 | AI only works if society lets it work. |
| 1:56.3 | There are so many questions have to be figured out. |
| 1:59.5 | And nobody came to my bonus class. |
... |
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