The same administration that proposed cutting the National Science Foundation's budget in half just co-signed a 16-nation declaration calling for a shiny new "golden age of science." Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, flew to Kyoto to pitch robot laboratories and AI-powered breakthroughs to the world. Back home, the NIH is bleeding out.
The Kyoto Statement, Explained
On Sunday, the United States released a joint statement with 15 other countries at the Science and Technology in Society Forum in Kyoto, Japan, according to NBC News. The document is titled the "Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science," and it reads like a TED Talk someone fed into a government word processor.
The statement opens by praising science and technology's benefits to society, then pivots to encouraging research that integrates AI. Except the statement doesn't call it AI. Per NBC News, it uses the term "super intelligence," because Trump signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence, because apparently that's something presidents can just do now.
"Super Intelligence and new ways of organizing research are opening entirely new frontiers of discovery," the statement reads, per NBC News. "We recognize the opportunity to take advantage of these changes." Tech ministers from Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates were among the signatories.
Kratsios and the Robot Lab Utopia
Kratsios, who spearheaded the vision statement, gave remarks at the forum that NBC News received in advance. In them, he outlined a future where laboratories run by robots and AI systems design scientific experiments, iterate on results, and analyze data at speeds no human could match.
"Super intelligence applied to science will be an incredible force for democratization of research and breakthrough developments," Kratsios planned to say. Democratization. That's the word he used. From an administration that is actively concentrating scientific funding decisions in fewer and fewer politically sympathetic hands.
The statement also endorsed the "growing field of metascience," which is the study of the scientific process itself. That's a genuinely interesting area of research. It is slightly less interesting when championed by an administration that has spent two years treating peer review and institutional expertise as a left-wing conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Back in the Budget
Here's where the story breaks down completely. The Trump administration's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 would cut funding for the National Science Foundation by roughly half, NBC News reports. Half. The NSF is one of the primary engines of basic research in the United States, the kind of foundational work that eventually produces the breakthroughs Kratsios is busy taking credit for in Japan.
The NIH has taken hits too. Gretchen Goldman, CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists, did not mince words when NBC News asked her about the Kyoto declaration. "They've shattered the trust of the American people in the way they've treated the U.S. science and technology enterprise," she said, pointing directly at NIH cuts. "It's hard to take seriously any promises of increased trust and transparency when you look at the actions they've taken."
The vision statement itself, with apparent sincerity, says that "public trust is the bedrock of scientific innovation and progress." The document endorsing public trust in science was authored by the same people who have spent years platforming vaccine skeptics, gutting federal research agencies, and installing political loyalists to oversee grant decisions.
AI Industry Is Already Moving, With or Without the Government
To be fair to the technology itself, the push to integrate AI into scientific research is real and accelerating regardless of what any administration says at a forum in Japan. NBC News notes that Anthropic and OpenAI have both recently launched initiatives to connect biomedical laboratories to powerful AI systems, and other companies have been attempting to automate lab processes for years.
The practical question is whether the United States government will be a meaningful partner in that work or just show up to the ribbon cutting. Right now, the administration is proposing to halve the budget of the agency that funds the basic research pipelines those AI tools will eventually need to do anything useful. You can't run robot laboratories on vibes and executive orders.
Kratsios is also planning to host a summit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday with scientific and business leaders, per NBC News. He submitted a report to Trump in July recommending changes to how the federal government funds research. Whether that report survives contact with a budget that slashes science funding by 50 percent is, at this point, genuinely unclear.
What 'Super Intelligence' Actually Means Here
Let's spend a second on the branding, because it matters. Trump's executive order renaming AI as "super intelligence" is not a policy. It is a marketing decision dressed up as one, designed to make a sitting president sound like he is at the frontier of something rather than scrambling to catch up with it.
The Kyoto statement dutifully adopts the new terminology throughout, which means 15 other countries are now co-signing an American PR exercise about a word change. Japan, the UK, South Korea, and the UAE did not travel to Kyoto to endorse a rebrand. They showed up for the actual policy commitments underneath it, which remain thin on detail and increasingly disconnected from what the U.S. government is actually doing to its own scientific institutions.
The gap between the vision document's language and the budget's numbers is not a footnote. It is the whole story.
The Dingo Take
The statement says public trust is the bedrock of scientific progress while the administration proposing it has spent two years doing everything in its power to destroy that trust. That's not a tension or a paradox. That's a lie wearing a press release.
Kratsios is smart. The Kyoto declaration is, on its face, a reasonable document. Robot labs, AI-accelerated research, international cooperation on metascience, these are not bad ideas. In a different administration, under a different budget, you could read the vision statement and nod along. But this one comes from the same White House that wants to cut the National Science Foundation in half and has already done serious damage to the NIH. You don't get to sign a golden age into existence in Kyoto on Sunday and then submit a budget on Monday that kneecaps the institutions that would actually have to build it.
Gretchen Goldman said it straight: it is hard to take seriously any promises of increased trust and transparency given what they've actually done. Hard to take seriously is diplomatic. The correct framing is that this is an administration trying to claim credit for a future it is actively defunding. The robot laboratories Kratsios is dreaming about in Japan will need researchers, institutions, and basic science pipelines to function. Right now, the people staffing those pipelines are watching their grants evaporate. No executive order renaming the technology is going to fix that.
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