WarTalk: NatSec in Congress + AI Evals for War

About this episode

Ike Harris discusses the challenges of evaluating AI models for military applications and the intersection of technology and national security policy.

How do you evaluate an AI model for a war you can only fight once? Ike Harris, a Naval officer turned Hill staffer turned AI policy operator, joins the show to discuss his effort to bridge the gap between the labs that build frontier models and the operators who'll deploy them. Ike Harris is the executive director of the newly launched Frontier Security Institute, and was most recently the Republican tech lead on the House Select Committee on the CCP, with prior stints in OSD and as a surface warfare officer. We discuss… The GAIN AI and Overwatch acts: and Congress's most aggressive attempt to wrest export-control authority from the executive branch since the Cold War Why you can't just "buy AI": and why national security evals look nothing like the SWE benchmarks the labs optimize for Strategic-level evals :for problems you can't run ten times, from Iran negotiations to targeting at the COCOM level China's robot-army advantage: open-weight models at the edge, Ukraine-style drone iteration soaked up via Russia, and a casualty tolerance the US can't match The "no more NASA" problem: how risk tolerance, mission command, and law-of-armed-conflict constraints shape who wins the…

People in this episode

Host: Jordan Schneider

Guest: Ike Harris

Topics covered

• national security
• AI evaluation
• Congress
• military technology
• China
• policy
• defense

Keywords

• AI models
• national security
• Congress
• military technology
• China
• evaluation
• policy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Frontier Security Institute, House Select Committee on the CCP, OSD, NASA

Places: China, Ukraine, Iran

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