Trey Lauderdale, founder and CEO of American AI (artificial intelligence) company Atomic Canyon, and IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi signed a working agreement partnership in Vienna. The agreement creates an opportunity for California-based startup Atomic Canyon to leverage IAEA data to further refine its AI models and work on AI solutions for navigating international nuclear energy information. The signature event was held in conjunction with the IAEA's International Symposium on AI and Nuclear Energy and was attended by IAEA officials, as well as representatives from the U.S. Departments of State and Energy, academia, and the private sector.
The partnership aims to improve access to the agency's non-classified information, including publications, and disseminate solutions powered by AI trained on IAEA information and datasets. This will accelerate the deployment of advanced U.S. nuclear technology for national security purposes, as President Trump directed in May's Executive Order 14299.
Atomic Canyon emerged from stealth in March 2024 to announce its Neutron platform “designed to improve efficiency, modernize regulatory approval processes, and streamline workflows” in the nuclear industry. “It was trained on millions of pages of documents from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and was a pivotal step in advanced AI search capabilities.” Starting with Neutron, Atomic Canyon sought to power a “renaissance in nuclear regulation” driven by AI and more efficient data navigation processes.
In May 2024, Atomic Canyon announced a new project in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to build safe and efficient open-source AI models for the nuclear sector. Atomic Canyon uses ORNL's Frontier Supercomputer, the world's fastest supercomputer, to train its AI models to understand complex nuclear terminology.
