Europe is rearming, but can it build the defence industrial capacity it needs to stand on its own two feet?

In this episode of Stop the World, David Wroe speaks with Kristijonas Vizbaras, co-founder of Lithuanian defence technology company Brolis, about Europe's changing security landscape and the lessons of Russia's war on Ukraine.

Kristijonas explains why Lithuania and its neighbours are preparing for war without panic, and how Brolis has built a defence technology business with supply chains designed to avoid dependencies outside Europe.

They discuss China's dominance of the drone supply chain, what the war in Ukraine is teaching Europe's defence industry, why Kristijonas believes Europe has the industrial strength to become far more self-reliant – and lessons for Australia.

It's a conversation about resilience, innovation and what it really takes to prepare for an increasingly dangerous world.

In this episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass, Politico Australia's Ryan Heath interviews Anthropic International Special Envoy, Jeff Bleich.

AI safety was a key theme of the interview. And continued a common theme from the frontier labs of proactively seeking government intervention into the sector, vastly different to the social media pioneers who demanded government stay out of their business. Jeff says that ideally pacing frontier AI doesn’t just mean preventing the AI capability from getting too far ahead of safety but not ahead at all.

Jeff and Ryan talk about recent AI cyber incidents, which Jeff says should be acted upon quickly but not through an alarmed panic, and rather as a healthy wake up call.

Jeff talks about the need to have the frontier companies and governments working closely to work out what reasonable regulation is, including published safety plans and independent evaluators.

Jeff also talks about the importance of developing AI consistent with democratic principles, and that means not only examining our own settings but needing to work out what our adversaries would seek to do with AI to harm us.

In the next episode of our TSD Artificial Intelligence Masterclass series, Justin Bassi speaks to Abi Bradshaw, Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate.

The discussion explores how the capabilities of AI models have evolved over the past six months and how frontier models can be used to protect Australia’s national security, including in cyber defence.

Abi shared her views on the need for governments to grapple with the technology, noting that cybersecurity and AI are not a spectator sport and that “the only way you can engage in this contest is to run into it.” She noted that what’s missing in the AI context right now is an early warning system to identify systemic trends and prevent, or detect earlier, future incidents such as the Hugging Face hack.

The conversation also covers the offence-defence balance in cyberspace as AI is rolled out, Project Glasswing and how governments are working with industry big and small to enhance their cybersecurity and why it’s important for Australia to maintain access to the most powerful models. They also discuss Australia’s “legacy technology debt” and the need for legacy tech to be replaced to address cyber vulnerabilities.

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