Can an AI Black Box Be Trusted to Run a Nuclear Reactor?

Can an AI Black Box Be Trusted to Run a Nuclear Reactor? By Haley Zaremba - Jul 25, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT China's Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled ADANES at WAIC in Shanghai, a five-layer AI system meant to control nuclear reactors from design through decommissioning. Nuclear officials call full AI integration inevitable, but today's opaque “black box” large language models clash with the transparency nuclear safety demands. The push comes as Microsoft, NVIDIA and a wave of U.S. startups race into nuclear power to feed AI's soaring energy needs, sometimes outpacing safety oversight.