The United States has historically relied on foreign sources for most of the raw materials powering its technological future, including essential minerals in smartphones and battery packs. ^[1] Google Cloud has released an update to its AI agent framework that integrates native image generation capabilities. ^[2] The author is writing the seventh post in a series about building an isolated homelab to learn AI infrastructure security. ^[3] The author designed an AI agent specifically to observe its own operations and behavior. ^[4] Researchers are utilizing agentic AI to accelerate the search for crops that can harvest critical minerals. ^[5] The goal of using agentic AI in this context is to reduce the United States' reliance on foreign sources for critical minerals. ^[6] The new feature couples image generation directly with structured prompt synthesis to streamline the workflow. ^[7] The development of crops that can harvest critical minerals represents a new method for securing domestic supply chains. ^[8]