The United States and 16 other countries endorsed a new international science declaration in Kyoto on Sunday that calls for wider use of “Super Intelligence” in research, alongside changes to how science is funded, organized and supported.
The Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science was adopted on October 4 at the Science and Technology in Society Forum. The White House announcement lists Argentina, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom alongside the United States.
The document puts advanced AI systems near the center of its research agenda. In the one-page declaration, the participating governments say SI is already accelerating research tasks and enabling new forms of scientific inquiry. They encourage its use to reason across large bodies of knowledge, build higher-fidelity models of physical and biological systems and drive autonomous, closed-loop discovery.
That ambition depends on more than models. The declaration calls for researchers to have broader access to SI tools, scientific data, computing infrastructure and experimental facilities. The practical implication is that automated research loops will require access to laboratories, instruments and compute as well as software: a model cannot independently run a physical experiment without a system capable of connecting digital reasoning to real-world measurement and validation.
The Kyoto Vision is also a science-policy document rather than simply an AI statement. It backs a wider mix of funding mechanisms, including long-duration awards, rapid grants, prizes and challenges, and encourages governments to experiment with research institutions offering different levels of autonomy and resources. It also endorses metascience, the empirical study of how research itself is organized and funded.
Scientific integrity receives unusually explicit attention for a short technology-focused declaration. The text says public trust must be earned through rigor and calls for reproducible and transparent science, communication of error and uncertainty, unbiased peer review and recognition of negative and null results. That language creates an important counterweight to the emphasis on accelerating discovery: faster experimentation is not presented as a substitute for verification.
The agreement is less concrete about implementation. Its operative language repeatedly says governments will “endeavor” to pursue the goals, and the one-page text does not specify a joint funding amount or an implementation deadline. The countries are endorsing a direction for their national science systems, not announcing a single multinational laboratory program with a shared budget and schedule.
The use of “Super Intelligence” also requires the same distinction now appearing elsewhere in U.S. policy. The Trump administration has begun using SI as its preferred federal term for AI, including in the newly announced Super Intelligence Force. The Kyoto Vision uses that vocabulary, but the declaration does not establish that artificial superintelligence in the technical sense has been achieved.
What it does establish is a broader policy bet: governments are preparing for AI systems to become more deeply embedded in scientific work, and they are pairing that technological ambition with changes to funding, infrastructure, research institutions and talent. Whether the Kyoto Vision produces measurable changes will depend on what the endorsing countries fund and implement after the declaration.
