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Eighty years ago, the architects of our first dual-use revolution whispered that they had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Today, a new power commands that same existential awe. It was born in elite laboratories, the product of massive government and corporate investment. It is an immense, power-hungry technology, requiring vast, specialized facilities and staggering amounts of energy to sustain its core operations. For decades, the public has viewed it with a mix of awe and dread, fearing its potential to upend global security, trigger arms races, and spark catastrophic, irreversible outcomes. It is the ultimate dual-use technology—capable of both destroying worlds and powering the future.
Yet, despite the apocalyptic warnings and geopolitical posturing, its most profound and specialized use case is far more personal: fighting cancer. By harnessing its invisible, computational power, we can now detect and target malignant anomalies with a precision once thought impossible. It zeroes in on the very building blocks of the disease, finding microscopic threats hidden deep within human tissue and deciphering biological codes to save countless lives in the process.
Did you think I was talking about nuclear energy?
You’re right. But I’m also describing artificial intelligence.
In recent years, AI has pivoted from a theoretical computational powerhouse to the frontlines of biology and medicine. This is no longer speculative; it is recognized at the highest echelons of science. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, an AI system that solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology by predicting the 3D structures of over 200 million proteins. By mapping these molecular blueprints, AI is fundamentally transforming how researchers understand cancer mutations, accelerate targeted oncology therapies, and design bespoke immunotherapies. Alongside these molecular models, advanced clinical computer vision systems are rewriting diagnostic timelines—whether predicting breast cancer with expert radiologist precision or training on hundreds of thousands of imaging scans to predict ovarian cancer risk with unprecedented accuracy, as pioneering companies like ProvanAI, located in my hometown of St. Louis, are doing today.
Beyond the clinic, and in my field of specialization, this paradigm shift is redefining planetary resilience through breakthrough Geospatial AI (GeoAI). By fusing foundation computer vision models with petabytes of satellite, radar, and aerial data, GeoAI allows us to monitor our world with unprecedented fidelity. When catastrophic natural disasters strike, these models map flood zones, building collapse patterns, and impassable supply routes in minutes rather than days, delivering vital situational awareness to humanitarian first responders. In agriculture, spatiotemporal models track soil moisture and crop stress across entire continents to forecast yields and preempt global food crises. From tracking environmental destruction to documenting human rights crises in denied territories, GeoAI is transforming raw overhead data into proactive stewardship for humanity.
Yet realizing this potential requires colossal infrastructure, and our adversaries know it. The frontier of AI demands vast data centers, specialized silicon, and gigawatts of electrical capacity—a physical reality foreign competitors are actively seeking to undermine. Recent intelligence and industry findings have exposed coordinated Chinese influence operations designed to manipulate the American public and derail domestic infrastructure expansion. Reports from frontier labs, including OpenAI, alongside the discovery of massive foreign bot networks on platforms like X, documented state-linked campaigns using generative AI to flood social discourse with fabricated claims that AI data centers are draining local power grids and driving up consumer energy costs. Beijing recognizes that compute capacity is the decisive strategic terrain of the twenty-first century. Just as the United States recognized that mastering nuclear technology was an existential imperative in the twentieth century, we cannot allow foreign propaganda to paralyze our critical infrastructure today. We must build the power, secure the compute, and win this race—because the security, economic sovereignty, and humanitarian future of the free world depend on it.
However, leading the world in compute does not justify reckless acceleration. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier, advocating for a deliberate slowdown in the development of frontier AI models to allow safety and alignment research to catch up. His call to action underscores a strategic imperative: our governance of AI must mirror the rigor of nuclear regulation. Just as the atomic age birthed non-proliferation treaties and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the AI revolution demands a comparable oversight architecture—embedded third-party inspectors, strict safety checkpoints, and enforceable global coordination. The United States and its allies must win the infrastructure race, but we must simultaneously lead the charge in establishing the international safeguards that prevent this dual-use technology from fulfilling the darkest prophecies of the nuclear age.
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