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Secretary Wright Visits Oppenheimer House in Los Alamos and Frames AI as the Next Manhattan Project, Feb. 25, 2025

February 26, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:01:20

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright states that he visited Los Alamos National Laboratory, which he calls a true national treasure formed during World War II, where, in his telling, scientists, engineers and chemists from around the world were scrambled together in two and a half years to win the race to build an atomic bomb.

Wright states that the culture and drive of innovation are still at Los Alamos, and that the next Manhattan Project is AI — a race he calls equally harrowing, in which finishing second, as he stated it, will affect national security, the pace of scientific discovery, industry, quality of life and the future. He says a good part of that effort will again be at Los Alamos, as he put it.

Why it matters

The Los Alamos stop gives the administration’s AI-competition case its founding analogy — Manhattan Project urgency, applied to artificial intelligence, at the laboratory that ran the original.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Visits Oppenheimer House in Los Alamos and Frames AI as the Next Manhattan Project, Feb. 25, 2025”, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 2025-02-26 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-02-26). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.