Trump Directs $50M AI Funding for Pediatric Cancer

President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing $50 million in new funding to harness artificial intelligence for pediatric cancer research, building on the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative he launched in 2019. The order tasks the Make America Healthy Again Commission, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, HHS and the NIH — with OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named as administration leads — to deploy AI to improve diagnoses, clinical-trial design, treatments, predictive models of therapy response, and prevention using CCDI data infrastructure. Administration officials said the funds will support competitive research grants, data-infrastructure improvements, and open scientific competitions and asserted that families will retain control over their children’s health data. Reporting differs on the timing and accounting of the $50 million (some outlets describe it as spread over 10 years, others as an additional allocation to existing annual funding), and the administration has not yet named which AI companies will receive contracts.