White House CTO Outlines Federal AI Agenda

White House CTO Ethan Klein said the administration’s tech agenda aligns government, industry and academia around three core priorities: ensuring American leadership in critical and emerging technologies, revitalizing the science and technology enterprise and ensuring all Americans can benefit from scientific progress and technological innovation. 

“In terms of how we’re actually achieving that, we believe that we need to be able to support the broader ecosystem across government, industry, academia, philanthropy — create tighter integration between all those key components — and build ecosystems … that are driving leadership in all those technology areas,” Klein said Tuesday at the Defense Tech Leadership Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida. 

Building a National AI Infrastructure

Klein also shared what success for the Genesis Mission would look like. In the short term, the administration would like to see initial operating capability of autonomous scientific workflows within a year. In the long term, Klein said the administration wants to “usher in a new era of AI and scientific discovery.” 

“And our hope there is that we’ll be not only doubling the productivity of the researchers, but we’ll be accelerating our path to those milestones, to those developments where we can show the American people: this is why we care so much about building out AI,” he said and predicted that AI would eventually enable new life-saving cancer diagnostics, discover new materials for nuclear reactors and expand economic growth. 

AI as a Force Multiplier for Defense

Emil Michael, War Department’s under secretary for research and engineering and CTO, said when it comes to AI at the Pentagon, it’s about more than just improving enterprise efficiency. As long as the department grows with AI and understands its capabilities, AI will become one of the “most important tools of the 21st century fight,” he said. 

“It has a lot of relevance to intelligence. You could take a lot of data that you would get from satellites and synthesize it so a human analyst could spend their time in more targeted ways,” he said. “And for warfighting, that’s both in designing weapons with new physics and new material science but also modeling and simulation: what do you need to have, how does a battle order look, where do your troops have to be? Across those dimensions, it’s a game changer.” 

Implementing AI at the Treasury Department

Treasury CAIO Paras Malik said last year she and Secretary Scott Bessent set the foundation for AI transformation at the department. Now, they are entering the AI implementation action phase.  

“Now what we want to do is move with deliberate scale and pace and the idea now as we think about 2026 is really focusing on higher value use cases for mission delivery, ensuring that we’ve got consistent risk management practices within the organization so we can scale in an effective way, as well as really bringing leadership attention to areas that matter,” she said. 

As part of that, the Financial Stability Oversight Council launched an AI working group to collaborate with the private sector on advancing AI and combat the “inherent tension” in financial markets between innovation and regulation.  

“The idea here is to bring together credential regulators and industry participants … to really understand how AI is being deployed in financial markets and discuss supervisory implications,” Malik said. “I think this is critical because we need to be able to pave the way for innovation without compromising safety and soundness.”