The Download: Trump at Davos, and AI scientists
MIT Technology Review AI·January 21, 2026 at 1:10 PM·
Trusted Source
At Davos this year Trump is dominating all the side conversations. There are lots of little jokes. Nervous laughter. Outright anger. Fear in the eyes. It’s wild. The US president is due to speak here today, amid threats of seizing Greenland and fears that he’s about to permanently fracture the NATO alliance. But Trump isn’t the only game in town—everyone’s also talking about AI. The UK government is backing AI that can run its own lab experiments. A number of startups and university teams that are building “AI scientists” to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that funds moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (the Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense of how fast this technology is moving: The agency received 245 proposals from research teams that are already building tools capable of automating increasing amounts of lab work.