White House officials said Thursday that the Trump administration believes the further introduction of artificial intelligence capabilities into scientific research is critical to continued U.S. technological leadership.
Speaking at the Special Competitive Research Project’s AI+ Expo, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein said the current administration’s primary focus is “to achieve better integration and coordination across scientific development, from technology development to testing to prototyping to scale-up.”
Klein said the increasing introduction of new capabilities like agent AI (autonomous systems that can perform specific tasks with minimal human oversight) will have a major impact on scientific research. In a Market Connections survey of more than 200 technology executives across government released Tuesday, 53% of respondents said their agency is already considering using agent-based AI or planning to pilot the technology.
“I think agent AI will be transformative in a wide range of applications, particularly in scientific discovery,” said Klein, who is also deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Further leveraging these capabilities will help expand and enhance data collection and change the types of experiments researchers can conduct, he said.
“If we can actually deploy these agent AIs throughout the workflow, I think it will greatly improve scientific efficiency,” Klein added. “This is very important because it underpins all of the technology that we’re trying to develop.”
The Trump administration has already taken steps to leverage AI to boost research efforts across the country. The largest of these is the Genesis mission, launched in November 2025, which aims to further leverage AI for scientific advancement.
Klein said this effort “will help bring a little bit of that power.” [when it comes to] Incorporating it into the workflows we know will create a new era of AI-powered scientific discovery. ”
But Thursday’s panel discussion came amid continuing concerns about how the Trump administration’s push to scale back government activities through layoffs and troop reductions is impacting research efforts.
Just last month, President Donald Trump fired all 22 members of the independent advisory board that oversees the National Science Foundation, which supports science and engineering research nationwide. Critics say the purge, which comes at a time when NSF does not yet have a permanent director, will harm continued U.S. scientific leadership.
Editor’s note: Market Connections is a division of GovExec, the parent company of Nextgov/FCW.
