Yesterday, the President released his FY2021 budget request. The request includes a significant increase in nondefense AI R&D compared to the FY 2020 Budget and a commitment to double nondefense AI R&D by 2022. If enacted, it would bring spending for AI R&D and interdisciplinary research institutes at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to more than $830 million, which represents a more than 70 percent increase over the FY 2020 budget. This increase would map well to A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the computing research community in late 2019. The roadmap, led by Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California and President of AAAI) and Bart Selman (Cornell University and President-Elect of AAAI), is the result of a year-long effort by the CCC and over 100 members of the research community.

The budget request also highlights Quantum Information Science (QIS), and would greatly increase QIS R&D funding with aggregate investment across key agencies increasing by more than 50 percent relative to the FY 2020 Budget, putting QIS R&D on the path to double by 2022. NSF investment in QIS research would double to $230 million, an additional $120 million over FY 2020. Quantum computing has been identified by both the Administration and Congress as one of the key “Industries of the Future.” For more on Quantum computing challenges, read here (based on a CCC 2018 community visioning activity). 

This budget proposal comes in the context of a broader overall debate on the budget. For more on that, see CRA’s post here.