US and 15 Nations Endorse AI-Driven Science Vision in Kyoto

The United States and 15 other countries plan to release a joint statement Sunday calling for wider use of artificial intelligence in scientific research, according to a copy of the document seen by NBC News.

The announcement is set for Kyoto, Japan, at the Science and Technology in Society Forum, an annual meeting of researchers and policymakers that started in 2004, NBC News reported. The statement is titled the "Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science."

What does the joint statement say?

The document opens by recognizing the benefits science and technology bring to society, then calls for research that builds artificial intelligence into the scientific process, according to NBC News. The statement refers to the technology as "super intelligence," a label tied to a recent executive order from President Donald Trump that renamed AI systems using that term, NBC News reported.

"Super Intelligence and new ways of organizing research are opening entirely new frontiers of discovery," the statement reads, according to the copy reviewed by NBC News. "We recognize the opportunity to take advantage of these changes."

The statement also welcomes what it calls the "growing field of metascience," the study of how scientific research itself gets done, NBC News reported.

Who signed the agreement?

Tech ministers from Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates are among the officials from the 16 participating countries who endorsed the statement, according to NBC News. The outlet did not name all 16 governments in its report.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, led the effort to draft the vision statement, NBC News reported.

What is the US official saying about AI labs?

In remarks prepared for delivery at the Kyoto forum and shared in advance with NBC News, Kratsios plans to describe a future in which robotic laboratories paired with AI systems design experiments, run them and analyze results faster than human researchers can.

"Super intelligence applied to science will be an incredible force for democratization of research and breakthrough developments," Kratsios plans to say, according to the remarks NBC News reviewed.

Are companies already building this kind of lab?

NBC News reported that Anthropic and OpenAI have recently started initiatives linking biomedical laboratories to their AI systems. Other companies have worked for years to automate lab work more broadly, according to the report.

NBC News quoted an unnamed line from its reporting describing fast-moving change in the field: "The landscape has changed everywhere, the ground is moving be..." The quote was cut off in the material NBC News published, and the speaker was not identified in the portion available.

What happens Monday morning for researchers?

The statement itself does not carry the force of law or set binding funding commitments among the 16 countries, based on the material NBC News reviewed. It functions as a shared policy statement — the kind diplomats use to signal coordinated direction without locking in specific national budgets or regulations.

For scientists and research institutions, the immediate practical effect Monday is limited. No country named in the NBC News report has announced new funding, new labs, or new rules tied directly to the Kyoto statement. What the document does is put 16 governments, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, on record favoring AI-integrated research as a shared priority heading into whatever funding or regulatory decisions follow.

Researchers watching the space will likely look for two things next: whether individual governments attach money or policy to the Kyoto language in the weeks ahead, and whether companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI expand the biomedical-lab partnerships NBC News described into other scientific fields. Neither NBC News' report nor the statement excerpt it published specifies a timeline for either step.

The full text of the Kyoto Vision statement and the complete list of the 16 endorsing countries were not published in full by NBC News as of its Oct. 3 report; the outlet described the document as one it had seen rather than one it was publishing in full.

For now, the Kyoto statement stands as a diplomatic marker — a point 16 countries can point back to as AI tools move further into laboratories, data analysis and experiment design over the coming year.