Genesis Mission Starting to Take Shape

This week, the Department of Energy announced $320 million for AI for science projects, largely at national labs, as part of the Trump administration’s “Genesis Mission.” The awards include $30 million to Argonne National Lab for the Transformational AI Models Consortium, which aims to build and deploy self-improving AI models across multiple scientific and engineering domains, and $40 million across four national labs for the American Science Cloud, which will host and distribute AI models and scientific data to the broader research community. The awards also fund research at the intersection of computing and high-energy physics, basic energy sciences, and nuclear science.

Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, who is heading Genesis, highlighted the awards at a House Science Committee hearing on the Genesis Mission this week. Gil said the Genesis Mission promises to define a “before and after of how we practice science and engineering in our country, for the better.” He said the department has already built some workflows for supercomputers to autonomously conduct experiments and iterate on the results. He also referenced AI-assisted projects currently in progress, including material design of more Earth-abundant alternatives to critical materials and “radically” shortening the timelines of nuclear plans from design to full build.

The awards announced Wednesday appear to encompass a combination of new initiatives and previously planned AI programs and projects, as some of the awards were first opened in 2024.

Elsewhere in DOE, the National Nuclear Security Administration issued a request for information on “transformational AI capabilities for national security” one week after the administration announced the Genesis Mission. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited Pacific Northwest National Lab last week to announce the commissioning of a new “autonomous-capable” science platform for anaerobic microbial experimentation, which he said would support Genesis.

The Genesis Mission aims to “double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” a DOE press release states. It will focus on three key challenges: American energy dominance, advancing discovery science, and ensuring national security. The mission’s centerpiece will be “an integrated AI platform to harness federal scientific datasets” that will be used to “train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs,” according to the executive order launching the mission.

The executive order does not commit any funding to the Genesis Mission. Science Committee Chair Brian Babin (R-TX) highlighted the role of the reconciliation megabill signed into law in July in “helping to kickstart Genesis” by providing funding for some of the awards announced on Wednesday. The bill added $115 million for NNSA to accelerate missions through AI and $150 million for DOE to take steps toward developing self-improving AI models for science and engineering, mainly by cleaning and preprocessing scientific data.

In Wednesday’s hearing, Gil highlighted the need to move quickly on the project. “We just have to act like our lives depend on it,” Gil said. “What we are seeing, what you can do right now with AI models compared to traditional systems, you see accelerations of 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x. When that happens, if we do not provide our national laboratories with the infrastructure necessary to do their work, and if we do not change the methodology with which we conduct science and engineering, and an adversary does it faster than us, they won’t be 10% better. They’ll be 1,000x better, and that’s just [an] unacceptable outcome.”

Gil also said that the mission will have to include a “very concerted effort to go discipline by discipline and field by field” to curate useful and AI-ready datasets.

“When we do that, we will take AI beyond its ability to do language and code, to its ability to do physics and chemistry and engineering, and that will change the direction of how we do R&D in the nation. But the data is the heart of the equation,” Gil said.

A DOE committee is currently working on delivering a list of at least 20 science and technology challenges in the areas of advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics for the mission to focus on addressing.

When asked by Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO), Gil did not specify a timeframe for the mission. He identified several metrics to assess the success of the project, including AI computing capacity, measured in flops; the size and AI-readiness of datasets; the problem-solving capacity of the AI models; and whether scientists are adopting the AI models.

Gil assured Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL) that DOE would avoid duplicating efforts at other agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “Every federal agency that is related to this matter has reached out to us to say, ‘Let’s avoid duplication. Let’s leverage what you’re building,’” Gil said.

Universities will be “a pillar” of the Genesis Mission’s success, Gil said, adding that the U.S. needs to increase the number of students with expertise in both physical sciences and computing and provide students with rotational opportunities in national labs. Gil has previously championed the idea of a new nationwide STEM talent strategy dubbed the “National Defense Education Act 2.0.”

Energy Subcommittee Ranking Member Deborah Ross (D-NC) expressed enthusiasm for the Genesis Mission, but said it is “very important to acknowledge the severity of the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to the Department of Energy and the effects these cuts will have on the Genesis Mission,” adding that the administration has proposed a 7% cut to DOE’s Office of Science in the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026, terminated billions of dollars in grants, and “fired world-class scientists.”