The American AI Festival
On a peak cherry blossom day in Washington, D.C., SeedAI brought together policymakers, scientists, and industry leaders from across the AI industry for the first American AI Festival. The agenda covered federal AI policy, energy and infrastructure, scientific discovery, robotics, the workforce, and what it will take to ensure the benefits of this technology reach every part of the country.
Austin Carson closed the day with a charge to the room: "Let's go make sure that the future is something that we make together."
Government and Talent
The morning opened with the federal government's talent pipeline. OPM Director Scott Kupor and NobleReach Foundation CEO Arun Gupta pointed to a gap that rarely leads policy conversations: only 7% of federal employees are under 30, while the government spends $750 billion a year on contractors because it cannot attract the software talent it needs. Their answer is Tech Force, a two-year program placing 1,000 engineers and data scientists into agencies through skills-based hiring that eliminates degree and tenure requirements, backed by 40 private-sector partners.
The policy conversation ran alongside it. Multiple speakers addressed federal preemption, community input on AI infrastructure projects, and workforce training incentives. "We've got to do a much better job of selling the positives," said Congressman Josh Gottheimer. "The good stuff rarely breaks through."
Science and Energy
ARPA-E Director Conner Prochaska framed the energy stakes directly: compute power used to be measured in flops; now we count it in gigawatts. He previewed the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission to accelerate R&D productivity across the national labs and called for private-sector partnerships at every level.
Medra CEO Michelle Lee argued that closing the loop between AI and the physical lab is the missing piece in reaching biological superintelligence in science. Sam Rodriques brought a striking data point: his AI research agent, Kosmos, completes six months of biological discovery in a single four-hour run. "Every time I've been skeptical about this," he said, "I've just been completely wrong."
NSF Assistant Director Erwin Gianchandani previewed the infrastructure being built to support this moment at scale, including a new network of 56 AI coordination hubs in every state and territory, announced the day before the festival. A panel with Jean-Paul Chretien, Anastasia Gamick, and Caleb Watney examined whether American science funding models are built for this pace, and what focused research organizations, innovation prizes, and new public-private partnerships could unlock that traditional grants cannot.
Governance, Robotics, and Education
The afternoon governance panel was grounded in examples. Utah's regulatory sandbox has already allowed AI to renew prescriptions and expand the scope of what dental hygienists can do with AI tools. Uber published its first algorithmic transparency report. The panel, moderated by Hodan Omaar, addressed what remains unresolved: who pays for third-party evaluations, how detailed transparency needs to be to be useful, and where federal standards are necessary versus where states need room to experiment.
Carnegie Mellon's Howie Choset laid out the manufacturing picture: the U.S. has no domestic manufacturers of industrial robots, while Asia is using AI-powered automation to compete directly for American jobs. The education panel followed, with Qualcomm, Arduino, and the STEM Ed Coalition examining what AI and robotics literacy requires and what evidence exists for what works. One data point stood out: 83% of FIRST Robotics participants went on to major in STEM.
Access and Infrastructure
Anthropic's Sarah Heck shared data on how quickly frontier AI capabilities are advancing, including a recent engagement in which Claude found 22 novel, high-severity vulnerabilities in Firefox within two weeks. "We are really in a moment where the defenders' window is open," she said, "but it is closing."
The final sessions turned to reach. Panelists from the SBA, Meta, and Armory Square Ventures discussed AI adoption in small businesses and regional economies from Buffalo to Oklahoma City. The closing infrastructure panel addressed compute access for non-elite research institutions and the consortium models working to close the gap.
The full day of talks, panels, and firesides is available to watch here.
