(Image credit: US mission in Vienna)
US AI (artificial intelligence) firm Atomic Canyon Founder and CEO Trey Lauderdale and IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi have signed a Practical Arrangements partnership in Vienna. The agreement creates opportunities for California-based start-up Atomic Canyon to leverage IAEA data to further refine its AI models and to work on AI solutions to navigate international nuclear energy information. The signing event, on the sidelines of the IAEA’s International Symposium on AI and Nuclear Energy, was attended by IAEA officials, representatives of the US Departments of State and Energy, academia, and the private sector.
The partnership aims to improve accessibility to the Agency’s unclassified information, including publications – and to disseminate AI-powered solutions trained on IAEA information and data sets. This will accelerate deployment of advanced US nuclear technology for national security, as President Trump directed in his May Executive Order 14299.
Atomic Canyon emerged from stealth in March 2024 announcing its Neutron platform “designed to improve efficiency, modernise the regulatory approval process and streamline workflows” in the nuclear industry. It was trained on millions of pages of documents from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and marked a pivotal step in advanced AI search capabilities”. Beginning with Neutron, Atomic Canyon sought to empower a “nuclear regulatory renaissance” fuelled by AI and a more efficient data navigation process.
In May 2024, Atomic Canyon announced a new project with the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to build a safe, efficient open-source AI model for the nuclear sector. Atomic Canyon will use ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer – the world’s fastest supercomputer – to train the company’s AI model to understand complex nuclear terminology.
