Good afternoon everyone. I'm Matthew Continetti, the Patrick and Charlie Neil Chair in American Prosperity and the director of domestic policy studies here at the American Enterprise Institute. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's discussion of 'Toward a New Golden Age of Science.' In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt tasked Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, with designing a strategy to continue scientific innovation beyond the end of the Second World War. Bush's response laid the foundation for our current scientific enterprise, including the National Science Foundation and countless university research programs.
In the just over 80 years since, American scientific innovation has brought about our nation's most seminal achievements. The Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bomb just three days before Bush published his report. 24 years after that, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted our flag on the moon. American innovation has produced a similar boom in technological development, from the creation of the internet to the mass production of drones and electric vehicles. The state of technology today warrants both praise and caution.
Today, American companies lead the world in technology, and American frontier artificial intelligence models—or should I say superintelligence—are transforming industry and innovation. But technological progress cuts both ways. Drone use in Ukraine and in the Strait of Hormuz has changed how we think of war in the 21st century. Semiconductor development and the AI race with China have given this competition high stakes.
To reflect on these important issues, it is our honor at AEI to have Michael Kratsios, the assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He leads the Trump administration's efforts to ensure American leadership in scientific discovery and technological innovation, including in critical and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology. In the first Trump administration, Mr. Kratsios served as the fourth chief technology officer of the United States at the White House and as under secretary of war for research and engineering at the Pentagon. Prior to the White House, Michael invested in, advised, and built technology companies in Silicon Valley. A South Carolina native, he graduated from Princeton University and served as a visiting scholar at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
In June, Mr. Kratsios's office released a report titled 'Science: A New Golden Age.' The report is a roadmap for the federal government to continue American scientific leadership and innovation. It tasks the administration with reinventing federal research and workforce development, securing dominance in emerging technologies, and promoting free scientific enterprise. Joining Michael on stage will be my colleague Tony Mills, who leads AEI's Center for Technology, Science, and Energy, and is an associate professor of practice at Notre Dame's John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Following their conversation, Ian Banks, the director of science and innovation at the Foundation for American Innovation, will lead a panel with Arthur Damrich, the director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes, Jen Gustich, the director of meta-science policy at the University of Progress, and Assad Ramanzanali, the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. They will discuss the obstacles and pathways for science reform in the coming years.
One line in the office's recent report struck me. It read, quote: 'The president understands the American story as one of ambition, discovery, and invention—of pioneers who forever seek new frontiers for exploration, particularly now in science and technology. Our investments in scientific and technological research will define the future of American innovation and free enterprise.' And the question for today is how we can build institutions and shape the characters of the people who run them that can live up to that ambition. With that, I ask Tony and Michael to come on stage and begin the conversation.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Matt, for the introduction, and thank you all for being here. As Matt said, I'm Tony Mills, senior fellow here at AEI and director of our Center for Technology, Science, and Energy. It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Kratsios to AEI. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Yeah, so we're here in large part to discuss the new report, the OSTP report, which Matt mentioned—'Science: A New Golden Age.' The report, as Matt noted in his introductory remarks, explicitly hearkens back and kind of serves as a 21st-century answer to Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 report, 'Science: The Endless Frontier,' also written in response to a presidential request at a moment—a kind of historical inflection point. Even the name of your report hearkens back to that era, sometimes known as the golden age of American science. So where I thought we could start is just to ask you: why did you write this report now, aside from the fact that you were asked to by the president? And also, how do you think of the old golden age of science, and why do you think we are in—or maybe entering—a new golden age of science?
Definitely. Well, thank you so much first for having me. It's exciting to be here. I know you have been thinking and writing about a lot of the issues that I cover in the report, so it's great to have a conversation with you. You know, when FDR first wrote that letter to Vannevar Bush and kind of asked him to think about what the science enterprise would look like, the landscape of U.S. science and technology looked very, very different than it does today. I think the obvious and kind of most important—and easy to recognize—feature of that ecosystem was how important the federal government was in driving research and development dollars. So roughly 70% of R&D was done by the federal government, and it was something that helped fund the war effort, and ultimately something that Bush saw as important to move from that war effort into something for the national interest. And he very rightly, for that moment, realized that if you could channel that federal passion for scientific discovery towards these national missions, you could do great things, and ultimately wrote his report, and then we were off to the races.
And I think what all of us know and recognize is that the era we live in today is very, very different from the era of the 1950s or 1960s when it comes to the way that science is conducted, the way technology is developed, and broadly how the science ecosystem functions. If you look at the R&D dollars alone, what we're seeing now is an inversion, where the majority of R&D dollars are spent by the private sector versus the federal government. So it's roughly 70/30. And if you double-click even into the basic research number, which everyone fixates on so much, it's about 50/50 right now. So just as much basic research is funded by the private sector as by the federal government. So if you think about just the landscape of how those R&D dollars are spent, you can quickly realize that creating or fostering an innovation ecosystem designed to support the era of the 1960s just isn't quite right. And there's lots of other stuff we can get into about sort of technological stagnation and how the current system has kind of let us down. But I think broadly the features are different. So one is the R&D dollars, and I think the second—which we'll probably get to in more detail—is just that the institutions that conduct science are fundamentally different today than they were then, or even in the 60s, 70s, or 80s. You know, we have amazing universities that do amazing work, and we don't want to detract from them, but there are also other great players in that ecosystem. The private sector obviously does a lot. There are new focused research organizations that are funded by philanthropy, for example. And in this landscape where you have so many different players in the ecosystem, I think it's important and incumbent on us to think about how we can drive the most ROI to that new ecosystem. And I think those are a few examples of why the system has changed and what spurred us to think more broadly about how to reform the system.
Yeah, you mentioned several themes that I hope we can get a little more into more deeply. And one of them is institutions. So one of the things that I think is very interesting about the report is the focus on institutions, and too often—so I really love this part of it—because too often I think when we think about science, it's just outputs. We kind of ignore the fact of institutions. They're sort of invisible in a lot of our discussions about how science works. One of my favorite lines in the report is: 'The shape of an institution determines the shape of the science it produces.' So this echoes my colleague Yuval Levin's work on how institutions are not—or should not be thought of—as just platforms but as molds that shape us. So what I wanted to ask you is: why do you think institutions—you mentioned them earlier, but why do you think they're so important to science? And what do you see as the current gaps in U.S. science institutions today? And why, as the report seems to suggest as well, do you think some of them may even be holding us back?
Yeah, I think another reality of science today is that discovery is increasingly multidisciplinary, and if you try to map that multidisciplinarity of science on top of the existing institutions you have today, there isn't a one-to-one map to it. And I think the most sort of obvious, bright-light example is just how universities are structured: they're generally structured around individual departments that have faculties that focus on one particular discipline; they do research in that one particular discipline and they publish research in that one particular discipline in journals that cover one particular discipline. But the reality is that's not how discoveries are made, and that's not how the future of science is happening. And I think the most obvious example of that is how superintelligence is impacting scientific discovery. If you are a materials scientist who wants to make a great discovery, you have to be proficient in how to use large language models and how to leverage superintelligence, and you will team up with people who have that expertise, and together you will make great discovery.
So, back to your institutions question: I think we have to have institutions that map to the realities of the science we're facing today. Is there room, and should there be room, for basic blue-sky discovery research in particular disciplines? Absolutely. And there's been no administration that was more full-throated on the support of basic research than this one. But I do believe that we have to also be able to show that we are encouraging, supporting, and looking towards the establishment of new institutions that are able to support the discovery of today. And that's why we talk about focused research organizations, and we very proudly launched our XLABS initiative at the National Science Foundation—1.5 billion over 10 years to create and fund these XLABS. And for those of you who don't know, XLABS are essentially new institutions that are set up for a finite period of time to solve a discrete scientific problem, made up of a set of multidisciplinary scientists. Now, pulling together that type of team to work on one particular problem over a discrete period of time—institutions like that don't exist. You can't just do that at a university—nothing against universities. You can't just do that at a private sector company, or you can't just do that at a national lab. So a new institution does make sense for that particular area, and you maybe want to give that a try.
So for us, I think institutions are really important, but one key thing—which I think sometimes gets a little conflated when we talk about golden age—is that more important than the new institutions themselves is the recentering of the scientific enterprise on the American scientist. That is the number one goal and the biggest takeaway from 'Science: A New Golden Age.' Our scientific institutions and our model of conducting science have let down American scientists for far too long, and the reforms that we try to do, particularly in the way that we approach institutions, are in the service of the scientist. The reason why you should be having new institutions, or supporting institutions that maybe didn't get the credit they deserve, is because that is where the scientist is. You need to meet them where they are, to do the research that they want to do in an environment, in a construct that works best for them to make their next great discovery.
So, I hope we can talk more about that last point and some of the proposals in the report for how to get there. Maybe before we get into that, sticking with institutions for a little while longer and thinking about the existing ones—you mentioned universities, and universities are an interesting case to think about because historically they weren't always the natural home for scientific research. And really it wasn't until after the creation of the modern research university in the late 19th century that we started to see the university take a kind of central place in the modern scientific enterprise, particularly—but not only—as homes for so-called pure or basic science. So, you know, Bush in his report referred to universities as the centers of basic research and the well-springs of knowledge and understanding. Of course, universities also provide a kind of mechanism for linking research to teaching and apprenticeship, ideally ensuring that universities don't just produce science, but also produce future scientists, sort of passing down the tradition of science.
Your report goes out of its way to emphasize that universities have an important role, but I think it's fair to say it doesn't have the same place in your report and the vision that it sketches as it did in Bush's. And so I was wondering if you could just say a bit more—you mentioned XLABS, but if you could say a bit more about how you see universities fitting into this idea of a golden age and how they could be reformed.
Yeah, I think universities are a critical component. I think there are a couple of ways I think about it. I think the first one is, again, a great example of where the ecosystem has changed. If you want to be on the frontier of research for superintelligence, you are not at a university; you are at a private sector company. If you want to be on the frontier of fusion science, you're at Commonwealth Fusion. You are not at a university. And that is not a bad thing. That is a great thing. That means that there is a diversity of institutions where frontier research and development is being done, and that serves the vibrancy of this country and our broader ecosystems. That makes me very happy. I think where universities have not been able to move at the same speed at which the ecosystem has changed is in the way that they actually do the training of the next great American scientist, and I believe that that is their number one, most important value add to the broader ecosystem. Scientists have to get trained somewhere. There is no better place in the world than American universities. They are the envy of the entire world. Everyone who's an aspiring scientist wants to come study and learn here. But the reality of the way that these advanced PhD programs are structured doesn't reflect the realities of the science ecosystem. And what I mean by that: roughly 60% of PhD recipients from our American universities in STEM do not go on to become university professors. They go into the private sector or some other role. Now, if you ask yourself, has the way that PhD training is structured changed over the last 30 years to reflect this reality? You would be very saddened to learn that it hasn't. And we continue to teach people to become academics when the majority of them do not become academics. And that is a mismatch—you're losing some optimization in the system that you really should be striving for.
And we've made a ton of efforts to try to fix that. So a couple: number one, we created the IPD, where essentially we're doing a pilot program where we have NSF dollars available to people pursuing PhDs that are matched with dollars from industry companies, and you can get a PhD in four years, where you do your fourth year in industry, where you do basic research at the industry partner, and then your dissertation is written on the research that you do at the industry. So you get out into the industry in four years. The second one that we launched at our Science: A New Golden Age summit is around another four-year PhD. Again, length is a problem. If you go anywhere else in the world, no one's doing these five, six, seven-year PhD programs. Everyone's got them tighter. I don't know why it takes us forever here in America. But we will do a four-year PhD where you can spend the last year of your PhD at a national lab or in industry in service of a Genesis Mission project. So here you have another example where you actually have real experience at a place where you could ultimately go work, which is a great national lab. And then the last program that we're piloting is a six-year bachelor-to-PhD, where if you know, after you graduate from high school, that you want to get a PhD in a particular scientific domain, you can graduate with a PhD in six years and go out into the world. And that's amazing. We'll have brilliant people aged 24 going out and making a difference for this country, and not have people wait until their late 20s or 30s to go make that impact. So to us, I feel like the quicker that universities can wake up to the reality that so many of their PhD graduates do not want to be academics, I think the broader ecosystem will be much better off.
I wonder if you've considered the less well known, very practical option of the five-year BA/MA in French, which was my choice.
So thinking about education, something that really struck me about the report is the emphasis. So much of the report is about a kind of optimistic vision of science and its future. There's a lot about AI and that technological revolution, its impact on science, but a lot of the report focuses on craft and manual labor and skill and skilled trades to really a surprising degree. I think that's distinctive—something distinctive about the report. And there's a nice section, if I'm remembering the title, 'The Marriage of Science and Craft,' where you cite Michael Polanyi, the polymath, and his concept of tacit knowledge, and also the work of sociologist Harry Collins, looking at the ways that tacit knowledge is necessary to the scientific and technological enterprise. So I just wondered, before we get into the policy reforms that we keep tantalizingly talking about, if you could say a little bit more about why the focus on craft and how you see it, especially in light of these changes in thinking about reforming education as well as impacts on science.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it actually hasn't gotten as much coverage once we published as I would have liked. I think sometimes we forget that in the full life cycle of technology, how important craft is to ultimately getting that final finished product. And, you know, one of my policy advisers flagged this great example where, I think it was in 2012, a few NASA engineers wanted to recreate the rocket that powered the Saturn V. And they pulled all the plans from the NASA archives and tried to recreate the rocket using the specs that were on the piece of paper. And they couldn't do it. And the reality was that as you're developing this technology or developing this rocket, there was craft involved. There were people on the assembly line tinkering with it to make it just right. And these are the types of skills that extend to a set of Americans far beyond those that we always seem to be focusing on—who's getting a PhD, and how many PhDs do we have, and what STEM degrees are they getting, whatever. But I think there's so much value in understanding that in order to have a well-functioning technology ecosystem, you have to have people who build with their hands literally every day as they're designing these machines, working on these assembly lines.
And I think if you kind of think back to some of the stuff that President Trump was talking about as early as the first campaign—the fact that we have sort of offshored our manufacturing, to huge detriment to the country. If you kind of map that to the issues that we're facing today, he could not be more correct. The further away that we have our manufacturing from our R&D and our technology development, the less skilled we are in actually doing that ourselves. So I think if you think of some of our greatest American entrepreneurs, the people who are making the greatest scientific discoveries and building the most amazing tools—take Elon Musk and what he was able to do: he doesn't design his rocket in Texas and build it in Taiwan. No, he does it literally in the same building. And I think that's what makes it so special, and that's why you can see such an amazing turnaround in it. So for us, we believe that through our educational programs, it's not just for high-end PhDs, but we have to be able to support the full swath of Americans that the ecosystem is standing on top of—the ones who are actually building the machines, who are operating them, and who are building the technologies.
So, I want to get now into some of the policy proposals. You know, there are a number in the report; you've mentioned a few already, and we obviously can't talk about all of them. But perhaps as a way of framing it, I think one thing I'd like to hear you expand on a bit is a theme that's in the report around scientific progress. So sometimes what you hear—this was an issue that was really highlighted by tech entrepreneur Patrick Collison a few years back, right?—the concern that science itself is slowing down, that scientific progress may be stalling out, that science is becoming less productive in some way. And so I wonder first if you share that worry, that diagnosis, and if so, what kinds of policy tools do we have available to try to address that?
Yeah, I mean, this was something that I have followed kind of throughout my career. I think Peter Thiel famously wrote this essay in National Review, I think in 2011, about technological stagnation, and cited a number of examples which sort of still remain true today. The fact that we're flying slower today than we were when the Concorde was in service. I think the amount, for example, of output you can get from an acre of land has essentially diminished, and we're not getting better outputs there. Sort of the general take on drugs and how it takes an increasingly longer time to create a new drug, and is increasingly more expensive to do so. And the list goes on. So there's this broad theme of technological stagnation, particularly in the world of atoms, in an era where we had this massive revolution in the world of bits. And I think one could step back and think: wait a second, I don't know about causation, but let's just do some correlation stuff here. We continue to attempt to do the same thing with just variable amounts of money as an input and hoping that the output's going to change. In reality, it hasn't. So I think we have to look in the mirror and tell ourselves: wait a second, maybe the way that we actually do the funding, the way we operate the machine, matters as much as how many coins you're putting in the machine. And I think for far too long, the establishment science advocacy community in Washington has maniacally fixated on how many coins go into the machine versus how the machine operates. And I think that's been to the detriment of science. And I think that's what we tried to cover in the report.
Yes, so let's talk about that. So fixing the machine: what you focus a lot on is reforming the way we make funding decisions, and that's what you're talking about here. So you outline a number of possible ideas. So could you just talk about which ones you think are most promising?
Sure. One of the most obvious ones is grant duration. Right now, the median grant at the National Science Foundation is two and a half years. So almost all grants kind of cluster around that amount of time. You don't have to be a scientist at all to know that it makes no sense that the vast majority of scientific grants funded by the US government are for two and a half years. Some stuff may take six months to solve. Some may take a year, some may take five years. Why in the world are we doing everything at two and a half years? That just doesn't make any sense. So we want to have different duration grants available for scientists. Back to what I said before: the North Star is supporting the scientist. So if the scientist has an idea that only takes six months, let's make funding available so that he can do that six-month experiment and then have another application and do more. Another reform is just velocity. Right now it takes 18 months from the moment that you submit your grant application to the time that you get funding. Imagine that you're a superintelligence researcher and you have a really great idea about how to create the next great large language model, and you put in for funding today. Where do you think the SI ecosystem is going to be 18 months from now? Makes no sense. You're not going to be helpful. So I feel like we have to be better on that front as well.
I think the second is we have sort of fallen into this politically correct, politically defensible position that everything should be just a merit review, and that if it's done that way with a panel of experts, then you can never be criticized for a decision that you make for any type of grant. And what that essentially has also done is create an environment where risky ideas are not brought to the fore. If you're a researcher and you have a little-bit-out-there idea that you think is not in the mainstream, you know that if you submit it to this grant review panel, they're just going to go for the least common denominator. You're not going to get funded. So we've introduced a program called Golden Tickets, where each individual member of the review panel has a golden ticket, and they unilaterally can make a decision to fund a grant if they like it. And why that's good is it allows for an opportunity for a little crazier ideas to be funded. But also, more importantly, I think it incents better reviewers to want to be part of the program because now they know they have a golden ticket and can make these decisions. So those are a few examples of the funding mechanisms. Another idea—not so much on reforming funding, but that is very prominently featured in the report—is the idea of building meta-science units into the science agencies. And, you know, this is a way not only to gain some visibility into what the agencies are doing, but to also help gather and establish an evidence base to assess what policies work.
So I know some agencies have tried meta-science-informed approaches before, sort of one-off, and not always supported institutionally. You propose a new approach, and I wonder if you could talk about that. And maybe, for those who are not in the science policy world, what is meta-science?
Well, I guess meta-science is the science of science. So I don't know if that's helpful either, but I think the core question is: you know, as scientists, you endeavor in the world to identify problems, try to solve them, test hypotheses, see what happens. But one area where we really haven't tested hypotheses is on how you conduct science. Back to this sort of coin-operated machine that the science associations don't want to touch. No one assesses whether or not the way that the machine operates is operating well or not. So we have to run tests. I have this idea that maybe it's really good to have golden tickets. Maybe we should allow individual review panel folks to have unilateral decision-making authority over one particular grant. Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? I don't know. I believe it does because there's research that shows it does. But we need to run the test, and it's incumbent on us to do it and to create a program within the federal government to run these tests, to get the data back. And three years from now, if they're like, 'You know, Michael, that was a horrible idea. We didn't really get good research out of it,' I'd be the first to say, 'Great, let's try something else.' So maybe you need two people to agree—whatever it may be. But I think you have to have a mechanism in order to run these tests. And right now we don't have that as a government. And I think even from a good governance standpoint, I find it shocking that we deploy—what is it, 150 to 200 billion dollars a year in R&D—but there's no one looking at how those dollars are spent and making an assessment of whether or not they were spent in a way which was to the benefit of the American people.
So I know we want to make sure we leave a little time for audience questions, and so I've got a couple more that I want to ask you with the time we've got. So I want to sort of step back. We've talked a lot about institutions and reforming them. We've talked about different policy ideas and experimentation in policy. But sort of stepping back and thinking about the report and then the moment that we're in: could you talk a bit about the reception that you've received from the report since its publication? I know you've shared elsewhere, in other venues, that you've received a warm reception. Have you received any pushback? A lot of the specific recommendations in the report really seem like they should be nonpartisan, right? But we're obviously operating not just in a policy context but a political one, and a very, very polarized political climate.
So the question I want to ask is: in addition to the reception, do you think the framework—the policy framework that the report outlines—could provide the basis of a new kind of common ground politically for science policy, or are we simply just too polarized?
I'm optimistic. I think in an environment where we're so divided on so many issues, this is one area which is one I think we can unite on. I think a lot of the ideas are not partisan in nature at all. Telling someone that maybe you should have grants of different durations because science takes a different amount of time for different types of experiments is obviously something that's hard to disagree with. So I would bucket a lot of our policy reforms as ones that are just a long time coming, that sort of institutional sclerosis just didn't allow to change. So I remain optimistic. I think we had a great event with the president at the Don Trump Institute for Peace a few weeks ago, where we showcased a lot of these reforms, and I think the audience was pretty bipartisan, and we continue to get good reception.
What I find amusing to some extent is the pushback from the establishment science press. You know, I think one of the funniest articles I've ever read in my life was the response that the journal Nature wrote in response to the report. And this is like black and white in the headline; it's not even buried. I think they say what's missing from the report is open borders—that was their answer. So I think the inability for the establishment community to at least recognize that some of these ideas are universally seen as things we should probably try has been a little frustrating. But broadly speaking, I think there's been good support. The Washington Post, without even talking to us, wrote a pretty positive editorial board piece on the report. So I think for us, I remain optimistic, and I continue to read the opinion pages of Nature and Science with a lot of laughter.
This sort of tees up the next question I really wanted to ask you. Thinking about the moment that we're in: I think it's fair to say that a number of the changes that the administration has made in science, technology, and in higher education have generated controversy. You know, so for instance, we hear from universities, from the broader scientific community—the establishment, you call it—certainly the media and the science media, about how changes to funding, staffing, research priorities are adversely affecting science, right? Concerns about brain drain—you hear a lot nowadays—constrained budgets, operational unpredictability, the list goes on. Of course, any serious program for reform is going to have to challenge entrenched interests, right? That's by nature. And so this is going to generate pushback. But at the same time, it seems like making enduring changes also requires not only building new institutions, but actively securing the participation, the cooperation of existing institutions—even and especially the ones that need to be reformed the most. So the worry there is otherwise reform itself becomes a kind of partisan football. So first: do you agree with how I've characterized that tension between necessary disruption of existing institutions and constructive cooperation with them? And how do you recommend striking that balance?
Yeah, you may say I'm playing partisan here, but I think a lot of the rhetoric by the establishment institutions about the assertions of things that are happening—I would find a lot of issues with, especially the brain drain issue. I think that's just a red herring and just fake news. But I think there's a lot of other stuff too there. But I think broadly, your point on whether or not everyone has to come along, I could not agree more. And I think the best example of that is the IPD program. There were 44 universities that agreed to create four-year PhD programs, and one of those four years their PhD candidate would spend at an industry partner. That's incredible. That's 44 universities across the country that said, you know, we haven't really done four-year PhDs before, but that's where the puck's going, or that's where the puck already is, and we need to skate to get there. And to me, that's a great example. I think the other one that I was very excited about was a partnership that we were able to announce at the New Golden Age Summit, where 14 universities from 10 states agreed to come together to create a southeastern regional compute hub. We made the point...
And we deeply believe that superintelligence is going to be the greatest unlock for scientific discovery in the history of the country, and that the most valuable resource that any university can provide their faculty is access to compute. And we have to find ways to be able to aggregate resources together so that each individual university isn't trying to create their own mini compute cluster. And that's again — these were, you know, 14 presidents and chancellors standing on stage with us, excited about a new golden age.
So there are a lot more questions I'd love to ask you, but I want to be respectful of your time and also give our audience here in the room a chance to ask some questions. So if you would please raise your hand and wait for a microphone, which will be passed around, and please state your name and affiliation if you would. So there's a question right here in the front.
Thank you very much. My name is Steven Snyder, and I'm unaffiliated. I had a question about superintelligence. So if the government sets federal standards for it, what institute would confirm compliance? Would it be like Casey, or an accredited third party, or something to that effect?
The executive order from June 2nd that the president signed established a voluntary process by which frontier model builders are able to share their models with the federal government, and through testing at Casey and also at the NSA, we're able to have an assessment of those and share those results with them prior to release.
