The presidential decree mandates the Department of Energy to establish an integrated artificial intelligence platform that connects U.S. supercomputers to scientific databases and federal laboratories, with the aim of accelerating discoveries in areas including nuclear fusion, semiconductor manufacturing, biotechnology, and quantum computing.
The text of the presidential decree stated that “America is in a race for global technological dominance in the development of artificial intelligence,” considering this technology “a new frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth.”
Michael Kratsios, the White House’s chief technology officer, told Fox News that the platform will be “the only place in the world where you can bring together biological data, national security data, materials science, and chemistry under one roof to train models that accelerate scientific discovery.”
The “American Scientific and Security Platform” is considered the cornerstone of the initiative, as it will provide high-performance computing capabilities and tools for AI modeling, in addition to massive collections of federal data, to train advanced scientific models and automate research processes.
The platform aims to achieve initial operating capability within nine months, in order to address at least one major scientific challenge from a list of 20 priorities, which the Department of Energy will develop within 60 days, and includes areas such as biotechnology, biomaterials, nuclear energy, advanced manufacturing, quantum computing and semiconductors, which are areas of increasing competition with China.
The presidential decree also calls for partnerships with private companies, universities and national laboratories, while emphasizing strict cybersecurity measures, in order to protect sensitive research.
This initiative falls within the Trump administration’s strategy, which aims to ease regulatory restrictions and support American technology companies in their competition with China for leadership in the field of artificial intelligence, while the administration is also looking for legal steps to prevent U.S. states from issuing special laws regulating artificial intelligence, threatening to withhold federal support from any state that takes this step.
