President Donald Trump signed a massive reconciliation package into law on Friday that features several cyber and AI-related provisions, including those aimed at bolstering the Pentagon’s tech capabilities, building up rural healthcare systems, and adding more tools for monitoring the country’s borders.
Dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the package includes $250 million to expand the Cyber Command’s artificial intelligence efforts.
It also includes $20 million for defense cybersecurity programs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, $90 million for APEX accelerators and supporting the Pentagon’s Mentor-Protege program, and $170 million for improving maritime domain awareness on the maritime border including those in the cyber domain.
AI is also set to be used to help advance military acquisitions through $450 million in applying autonomous systems to naval shipbuilding, and $124 million in improvements to the Test Resource Management Center’s AI capabilities.
The Department of Defense (DoD) – which has repeatedly failed its audits, a long-standing challenge made even more difficult by ongoing struggles to modernize its IT systems for improved financial management – will apply AI to “accelerate the audits of the financial statements” of the DoD, according to the bill’s text, which gives $200 million toward that initiative.
Other top priorities of the current administration and Congress received boosts for integrating AI – including $115 million for “accelerating nuclear national security missions” through AI and providing $6.17 billion to border security efforts overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.
Nuclear energy has been a focus of the second Trump administration to power its AI directives – including building AI data centers in most states – placing an extra demand on an already strained grid. Most recently, the administration announced that the DoE will have several small modular reactors running by next summer to help power AI and advanced technologies.
Border security operations supported by AI-powered systems will include “non-intrusive inspection equipment and associated civil works” to “combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry and along the southwest, northern, and maritime borders.”
The most significant amount of spending on non-defense or security-related cyber spending includes $50 billion for rural health care, a portion of which can be spent on “training and technical assistance” for technology adoption and development that will “improve care delivery in rural hospitals.” Technology that can be funded under the bill includes remote monitoring, robotics, AI, and “other advanced technologies.”
It is unclear exactly how much of that appropriated number will be used for technology-related purposes.
The package also includes $150 million for the Department of Energy (DoE) to develop “transformational” AI models. That funding would be made available to the department through September 2026.
It also directs the secretary of energy to build partnerships between its National Laboratories and industry to “curate the scientific data” of the Energy Department 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.”
This would be undertaken with the aim of seeding efforts for “self-improving” AI models to be used for science and engineering that creates new energy technologies.
Data efforts “may be used to rapidly develop next-generation microelectronics that have greater capabilities beyond Moore’s law while requiring lower energy consumption,” according to the bill’s text.
The cyber and AI provisions passed while a controversial moratorium proposed by Republicans to restrict states from passing and enforcing laws regulating AI was stripped by the Senate, including other dropped cyber-related provisions.