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Trump Calls on AI to Speed Up Science–While Continuing to Defund It

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President Trump used a White House summit called “Science: A New Golden Age” to champion artificial intelligence as the engine to speed American research, announcing that OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, Amazon and other firms have pledged more than $2.4 billion to the Genesis Mission - a program created by his November 2025 executive order to link Department of Energy labs with industry and academia for advances in energy, discovery science, and national security. He also awarded National Medals of Science and Technology to prominent tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Satya Nadella, and Michael Dell; several recipients have large financial ties to him, from campaign donations (Musk nearly $300 million in 2024) to inauguration and White House fundraising gifts.

That public embrace of corporate AI funding sits alongside continuing cuts to federal research institutions and programs, including funding for chronic disease and climate science, prompting a central critique: the administration is substituting private, for-profit actors for long-standing public research infrastructure. Questions remain whether corporate AI investments and industry-led “missions” can replace lost NIH and other federal research dollars, while the close donor relationships and Trump’s personal stock trades in major tech companies raise conflicts-of-interest concerns about who shapes national science priorities.

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