The Lawfare Podcast

Scaling Laws: Can AI Make AI Regulation Cheaper?, with Cullen O'Keefe and Kevin Frazier

Mar 6, 2026
Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at UT Austin and Lawfare senior editor, and Cullen O'Keefe, Research Director at the Institute for Law & AI, discuss automated compliance for AI. They explore how compliance costs fall harder on startups, the limits of compute thresholds, which reporting and evaluation tasks AI can automate, Goodhart-style gaming risks, and the idea of conditional "automatability triggers" to time regulation.
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INSIGHT

Compute Thresholds As A Regulatory Proxy

  • Compute thresholds aim to target regulation at better-capitalized firms by using training FLOPs as a proxy for risk and firm capability.
  • Cullen O’Keefe explains thresholds (e.g., 10^26 FLOPs) would likely capture firms that can absorb compliance costs.
INSIGHT

Reasoning Models Undermine FLOP Proxies

  • Reasoning models and inference-time compute reduce the reliability of fixed training-FLOP thresholds as capability proxies.
  • Cullen warns firms trade training compute for more test-time compute, lowering the FLOPs needed for given capabilities.
ADVICE

Automate Reporting And Evals With AI

  • Use AI to automate transparency reporting, model evaluations, incident monitoring, and disclosures to lower compliance costs.
  • Kevin Frazier argues these tasks—aggregating, parsing, and sharing data—are near-term automatable and reduce disproportionate burdens.
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