Why this BoF matters
A year ago we argued that autonomous laboratories were operating as isolated islands and proposed a grassroots network to connect them. The year since moved faster than our roadmap anticipated: multi-agent systems produced experimentally validated hypotheses, self-driving laboratories entered a more interoperable second generation, the interface layer consolidated around MCP and A2A, and the Genesis Mission placed autonomous experimentation at the center of U.S. federal science strategy. Progress met a sobering countercurrent. A flagship discovery result was corrected, benchmarks show agents completing only a small fraction of open-ended research, and no system has yet made and experimentally self-validated a genuinely novel discovery end to end. Producing a candidate discovery is no longer the hard part, verifying it is. This BoF presents a two-year community roadmap that rescores the original milestones and elevates trust and verification, and safety and governance, to first-class dimensions.
Discussion themes
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What does end-to-end verification of an autonomous discovery actually require, and who certifies it?
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Which milestones from the 2025 roadmap held up, which need reframing, and what is still open?
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How do we coordinate agents across institutional boundaries under zero-trust assumptions?
