AI Week in Review - 6/14/25

The Details

Federal

White House AI czar on race with China: ‘We’ve got to let the private sector cook’
White House AI czar David Sacks argues that loosening regulations and trusting private-sector innovation is essential for the U.S. to outpace China and claim global leadership in AI.

Congress arms NSA to shield America’s AI edge
A bipartisan House bill would empower the NSA to set cybersecurity standards, detect foreign threats, and thwart AI espionage to secure—and sustain—U.S. leadership in advanced artificial intelligence

Interior exploring AI use to address probate backlog in tribal communities
Interior considers using AI to streamline data entry, track probate packages, and clear a 48,000-case backlog in tribal land inheritance, boosting housing availability and easing fractionation delays.

Army recruits officers from Meta, OpenAI and Palantir to serve in new detachment
Army forms Executive Innovation Corps, commissioning Meta, OpenAI and Palantir tech chiefs as Reserve lieutenant colonels to infuse commercial expertise into force modernization and dual-use acquisitions.

Inside the Navy’s strategic pursuit to prototype and deploy GenAI at scale
After a 45-day alpha, the Navy will scale DoN GPT—an IL5 Flank Speed GenAI assistant—to automate acquisition documents and other tasks, easing staff cuts and accelerating innovation.

Unprecedented dataset of molecular simulations to train AI models released
Meta, Berkeley Lab and Los Alamos released “Open Molecules 2025,” a 100-million-simulation dataset enabling quantum-chemistry-level AI models for drug, materials and energy breakthroughs.

Trump to headline AI energy summit in Pittsburgh
President Trump will keynote Sen. Dave McCormick’s July 15 Pennsylvania Energy & Innovation Summit, uniting AI and energy giants to fuse data-center growth with the state’s natural-gas boom.

The AI lobby plants its flag in Washington
Top AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI are aggressively expanding their Washington lobbying efforts, seeking influence over light-touch regulation and access to the federal government’s AI budget.

State / Local

PA Governor announces $20 billion AI investments
Amazon will invest at least $20 billion to build AI and cloud computing campuses in Pennsylvania, creating 1,250 high-tech jobs and marking the state’s largest-ever private sector investment.

SF city attorney turns to AI to cut down on ‘policy sludge’
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu used Stanford’s STARA AI to sift 16-million-word municipal code, flagging 528 redundant reports and enabling legislation to slash bureaucratic workload.

Texas’ relationship with AI is ‘getting serious’
Texas CIO Amanda Crawford says the state is “getting serious” with AI, educating staff and test-driving 50 chatbot and operations tools in DIR’s Innovation Lab.

AI Helps Iowa lawmakers track, evaluate bills
Iowa’s House and Governor an AI platform that analyzes, tracks and “chats” with bills, slashing clerks’ workload and heralding AI-assisted lawmaking across state capitols.

International

Mapping the potential – GenAI and public sector work
A new Turing Institute report finds that 41% of UK public sector work could be supported by generative AI, with potential time savings varying across sectors like education (49%) and healthcare (33%).

UK PM launches national AI skills drive
The UK government has launched a £187 million national AI and digital skills program, aiming to equip 1 million students and 7.5 million workers with future-ready tech capabilities by 2030.

UK government uses Gemini to support faster planning decisions
The UK government is using Google's Gemini-powered tool, Extract, to digitize and accelerate planning decisions by transforming old maps and documents into actionable geospatial data in seconds.

AU Industry and Innovation Minister outlines AI priorities
Minister Tim Ayres outlines a three-pronged AI strategy focused on infrastructure investment, local capability building, and productivity gains to secure Australia’s stake in the global AI ecosystem.

What if China wins the AI race?
Foreign Affairs argues the United States must keep pushing for AI leadership while crafting standards, interoperability, and safeguards so it can still prosper if Chinese models overtake American ones.

EU publishes GenAI Outlook Report
European Commission JRC Outlook says GenAI could spur EU innovation and productivity but requires multidisciplinary governance to tackle misinformation, bias, labor disruption and privacy under the AI Act framework.

Everything Else

Apple dives into how AI reasons
This study from Apple finds that frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit significant performance collapse at high complexity, revealing limitations in scaling, self-correction, and algorithmic reasoning despite longer thought traces

How Anthropic teams se Claude Code
Anthropic’s teams—from engineering to legal—use Claude Code to accelerate workflows, automate complex tasks, and empower non-developers, boosting productivity and enabling broader AI integration across functions.

Barbie-maker Mattel teams up with OpenAI
Mattel partners with OpenAI to launch its first AI-powered toy later this year and deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across operations, aiming to revive sales through safer, age-appropriate AI play experiences.

Meta poaches 28-year-old Scale AI CEO after taking multibillion dollar stake in startup
Meta will invest $14.3 billion for a 49 % stake in data-labeler Scale AI, valuing it at $29 billion and bringing CEO Alexandr Wang to lead Meta’s new super­intelligence unit.