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Here’s all the AI stuff in Trump’s tax bill

Over $2 billion is allocated to deploying AI for nuclear weapons programs, autonomous underwater drones, and sovereign AI models.

Jon Keegan

Yesterday the Senate passed President Trump’s massive tax bill, and today it heads to the House, where it faces an uncertain future.

The text of the bill is loooong — it spans 870 pages as a PDF and is full of allocations of federal dollars for Trump’s priorities, including over $2 billion for AI programs for defense, energy, and homeland security.

Top AI insiders might hold a lot of sway in this administration, but tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI did suffer a major loss yesterday when a key provision to halt all state-level AI regulation for a decade was removed from the bill.

Things could change in the House, but let’s take a look at all the AI-related things that made it through the Senate.

Defense

💣 Resources for scaling low-cost weapons into production

 💻 Improving efficiency and cybersecurity

  • $200,000,000 for the deployment of automation and artificial intelligence to accelerate the audits of the financial statements of the Department of Defense

☢️ Enhancement of resources for nuclear forces

  • $115,000,000 for accelerating nuclear national security missions through artificial intelligence

⛴️ Enhancement of Department of Defense resources for shipbuilding

  • $188,360,000 for the development and testing of maritime robotic autonomous systems and enabling technologies

  • $174,000,000 for the development of a Test Resource Management Center robotic autonomous systems proving ground

  • $200,000,000 for the development, procurement, and integration of mass-producible autonomous underwater munitions

  • $500,000,000 to prevent delays in delivery of attritable autonomous military capabilities

  • $75,000,000 to contract the services of, acquire, or procure autonomous maritime systems

Energy

🤖 Transformational artificial AI models ($150 million)

  • “American science cloud”: a system of US government, academic, and private sector programs and infrastructures utilizing cloud computing technologies to facilitate and support scientific research, data sharing, and computational analysis across various disciplines while ensuring compliance with applicable legal, regulatory, and privacy standards

  • Mobilize National Laboratories to partner with industry sectors within the United States to curate the scientific data of the Department of Energy across the National Laboratory complex so that the data is structured, cleaned, and preprocessed in a way that makes it suitable for use in artificial intelligence and machine learning models

  • Initiate seed efforts for self-improving artificial intelligence models for science and engineering

Homeland Security

🚔 Border security, technology, and screening

  • $168,000,000 for procurement and integration of new nonintrusive inspection equipment and associated civil works, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies, as well as other mission support, to combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry and along the southwest, northern, and maritime borders

Rural hospitals

🏥 Rural health transformation program ($50 billion)

  • Providing training and technical assistance for the development and adoption of technology-enabled solutions that improve care delivery in rural hospitals, including remote monitoring, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies

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Microsoft considers suing Amazon and OpenAI over $50 billion deal

Microsoft may be about to take its biggest AI partner to court, the Financial Times reports.

Microsoft, a longtime backer of OpenAI, is weighing legal action over the latter’s $50 billion deal with Amazon tied to its new Frontier AI product, arguing it could violate a key clause in their exclusive cloud deal requiring OpenAI’s models to run through Azure. Amazon and OpenAI say they’ve found a workaround. Microsoft executives disagree.

“We know our contract,” a source told the FT. “We will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them.”

OpenAI, which is eyeing an IPO this year and under pressure to generate more revenue, is trying to loosen Microsoft’s grip as it scales, while Microsoft increasingly sees OpenAI as both a partner and competitor.

“We know our contract,” a source told the FT. “We will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them.”

OpenAI, which is eyeing an IPO this year and under pressure to generate more revenue, is trying to loosen Microsoft’s grip as it scales, while Microsoft increasingly sees OpenAI as both a partner and competitor.

tech

Morgan Stanley says robotaxis could help Tesla sell more cars

Morgan Stanley analysts think Tesla’s robotaxi push could boost more than just a new business line — it could help sell more cars and software, too.

After visiting Giga Texas, analysts said they’re more optimistic about Tesla’s progress toward an unsupervised robotaxi rollout, with improvements in tricky pickup and drop-off scenarios where Tesla doesn’t have as much data from consumer usage. For now, the vast majority of its vehicles still have human supervisors in the front seat, but the analysts say the service is helping Tesla.

“Incremental unsupervised robotaxi miles driven improve the underlying autonomy model, which accelerates the path to personal unsupervised FSD [Full Self-Driving]. This, in turn supports higher FSD attach rates, improves auto demand, and cash flow generation.”

In other words, the more robotaxis drive, the better Tesla’s self-driving gets — and that could make its Full Self-Driving software more appealing and its cars easier to sell, in addition to improving its robotaxi service. Note that Tesla’s vehicle deliveries, which accounts for the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, have dropped two years in a row.

Morgan Stanley also sees a cost advantage. It estimates Tesla’s robotaxis could cost about $0.81 per mile to run today — cheaper than traditional ride-hailing and rival autonomous services — with costs falling further as purpose-built vehicles like the Cybercab scale.

Morgan Stanley maintained its equal-weight rating and $415 price target, about 4% above where the stock is currently trading.

$600B

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees at an all-hands meeting on Tuesday that he sees AI growing AWS sales to $600 billion a year by 2036, Reuters reports — double his prior estimate and more than 4x last year’s revenue.

Shares of Amazon, which were already up for the day, moved modestly higher on the heels of the report.

tech

OpenAI snags Amazon AWS deal for classified government work with Anthropic pushed aside

Following Anthropic being deemed a “supply chain risk” to national security, the field is clear for OpenAI. The Information is reporting that OpenAI just landed a deal with Amazon AWS to sell its AI services to government employees for both classified and unclassified work.

Previously, OpenAI was contractually obliged to use Microsoft Azure cloud hosting for the government contracts it handled as part of its $13 billion deal with the software giant, but since it restructured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated the terms of the deal, OpenAI is free to use AWS, which is more commonly used in government work.

According to the report, contracts that sell AI services through another company like Amazon can be much larger then direct contracts with the government, which is crucial for OpenAI as it chases the success that Anthropic has had with enterprise customers.

Previously, OpenAI was contractually obliged to use Microsoft Azure cloud hosting for the government contracts it handled as part of its $13 billion deal with the software giant, but since it restructured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and renegotiated the terms of the deal, OpenAI is free to use AWS, which is more commonly used in government work.

According to the report, contracts that sell AI services through another company like Amazon can be much larger then direct contracts with the government, which is crucial for OpenAI as it chases the success that Anthropic has had with enterprise customers.

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