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U.S. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) introduced legislation on Monday to support Bitcoin miners, arguing that the industry needs government help to prevent foreign adversaries from gaining outsized influence over the digital asset’s network.

The Mined in America Act is aimed at empowering the government to support Bitcoin miners through federal programs, while also enshrining U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve into law, according to a press release.

“The Mined in America Act brings this industry home through forward-thinking initiatives to secure our financial future,” Lummis said in a statement. “President Trump pledged to make the United States the digital asset capital of the world—and we’re not backing down.”

The legislation would create a voluntary certification program where mining entities facilities can become certified as “Mined in America” under the Commerce Department. As part of that certification, those entities commit to phasing out “mining equipment manufactured by companies tied to foreign adversaries” like Russia and China.

Projects certified as “Mined in America” gain the ability to tap existing federal energy and rural programs amid the shift, the press release states. What’s more, the government would be committed to helping U.S. manufacturers develop crypto mining equipment onshore.

The Mined in America Act was crafted with support of the Satoshi Action Fund, and in a statement, CEO and co-founder Dennis Porter described the industry’s reliance on hardware from China as a “liability.” Those machines total 97% of Bitcoin’s so-called hash rate, he said.

In some ways, the legislation mirrors the Chips and Science Act. Enacted in 2022, the legislation set aside federal funding for domestic chip-manufacturing. At the time, supply chains snarled by the global pandemic raised questions about the country’s exposure to regions like Taiwan, where the world’s most advanced chips are fabricated.

The bill lands as Bitcoin miners increasingly pivot toward artificial intelligence, with profitability pressured by the digital asset’s latest fall from all-time highs. Cassidy signaled that Bitcoin mining has the potential to buoy blue-collar job creation, at a time when data center buildouts are accelerating as a result of the AI boom.

“Digital asset mining is a big part of our economy. We should be doing it here in America,” he said. “This bill will secure supply chains, back U.S. manufacturing, and support this industry.”

Trump’s promise to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was among his biggest overtures to digital asset investors on the campaign trail. However, the U.S. government has yet to unveil an allocation that’s only allowed to stem from budget-neutral strategies.

In October, Lummis advocated for $14.4 billion in Bitcoin seized from the alleged head of a global crypto scam network to be diverted to the reserve. At the time, the seizure represented the DOJ’s largest haul in the cryptosphere.

Not long before, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. unveiled a Bitcoin mining venture dubbed American Bitcoin. Earlier this month, the company indicated in an SEC filing that its fleet “primarily comprises Bitmain S21 series and MicroBt M5X and M6X series machines.”

Those machines are primarily manufactured in China.

Deep research AI has been one of the hottest arms races in tech this year. Google announced its research agent for Gemini in December 2024, OpenAI released its own research agent in February 2025, xAI followed suit, Perplexity doubled down, and Anthropic’s Claude built a loyal following among professionals who need detailed, cited answers, introducing its agent in April of last year.

Every company has been trying to convince you that their single AI model is the smartest researcher in the room. Microsoft just said: Why pick one?

The company announced two new features on Monday for Copilot’s Researcher tool—called Critique and Council—that put OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude to work on the same research task in sequence. The result, according to Microsoft’s testing against an industry benchmark, scores higher than every system included in that test, including models from the top AI companies.

“Critique is a new multi model deep research system designed for complex research tasks. It separates generation from evaluation and utilizes a combination of models from Frontier labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI,” Microsoft explains. “One model leads the generation phase, planning the task, iterating through retrieval, and producing an initial draft, while a second model focuses on review and refinement, acting as an expert reviewer before the final report is produced.”

Here’s the basic problem Critique is designed to fix: Every AI research tool today works the same way. You ask a question, one model plans a search, scours sources, writes a report, and hands it back to you. That single model is doing everything with no one checking its work.

This can end up with some hallucinations slipping in, some errors in citations, fake or inaccurate claims, etc.

Critique breaks that workflow in two. GPT handles the first phase—it plans the research, pulls sources, and writes an initial draft. Then Claude steps in as a strict editor, reviewing the report for factual accuracy, citation quality, and whether the answer actually addressed what was asked. Only after that review does the final report reach the user. Microsoft says the roles can eventually run in the opposite direction too, with Claude drafting and GPT critiquing, though for now GPT goes first.

On the DRACO benchmark—a standardized test covering 100 complex research tasks across 10 domains including medicine, law, and technology—Copilot with Critique scored 57.4. points with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 by itself hitting 42.7. Microsoft’s combined system beats the next best result by nearly 14%.

The biggest gains showed up in breadth of analysis and presentation quality, with factual accuracy also posting a significant improvement.

The second feature, Council, takes a different approach to the same problem. Instead of having one model review the other’s work, Council runs GPT and Claude simultaneously and puts their full reports side by side. A third “judge” model then reads both and writes a summary explaining where the two AIs agreed, where they diverged, and what unique angles each one caught that the other missed. Comparing AI research tools manually has been something users have had to do themselves until now.

In Critique, the models essentially collaborate with each other while in Council the models compete against each other.

Critique is the default experience in Researcher whereas Council requires you to select “Model Council” from the picker to activate the side-by-side mode. Both features are currently available to users enrolled in Microsoft’s Frontier program, the early-access channel for Copilot’s newest capabilities. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license ($30/user/month) is required, but users also need to be enrolled in Frontier to access them.

OpenAI and Microsoft have a multibillion-dollar partnership, but Microsoft’s bet is that no single model stays on top for long, and that the real value is in the orchestration layer that routes tasks to whichever combination works best.