Trump Administration Launches ‘Genesis Mission’ to Boost Science through AI

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Monday launching the “Genesis Mission” — a national effort to advance scientific discovery and technological innovation using artificial intelligence. A press release from the Department of Energy says the mission aims to “double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.”

The centerpiece of the Genesis Mission will be the creation of “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.”

This platform, which will be known as the American Science and Security Platform, will be operated using the Department of Energy’s national lab supercomputers and other resources, and will cover data in a range of scientific domains that are yet to be selected. The effort represents a significant expansion of plans to develop the “world-class scientific datasets” outlined in the AI action plan published by the Trump administration earlier this year.

The Genesis Mission will be led by DOE, with Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil serving as the project’s director. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy and assistant to the president for science and technology, will also play a leading role in the mission by coordinating the involvement of other agencies and departments in the project and issuing guidance to “ensure that the mission is aligned with national objectives.”

A DOE press release said the Genesis Mission will focus on three key challenges — American energy dominance, advancing discovery science, and ensuring national security. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the mission would call on the nation’s brightest minds and industries in a similar manner to the Manhattan Project and Apollo program. “The Genesis Mission will unleash the full power of our National Laboratories, supercomputers, and data resources to ensure that America is the global leader in artificial intelligence and to usher in a new golden era of American discovery,” Wright said.

Trump’s executive order outlines a series of next steps for the mission.

• Within 90 days, DOE is to identify all federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the mission, as well as potential resources from industry partners.
• Within 120 days, DOE is to identify initial datasets to include in the platform and develop a plan to safely and securely incorporate them.
• Within 240 days, DOE is to have completed a review of its capability to “engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related and technical and operational standards needed.”

Another key task to be performed by DOE is the identification 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, which will then be reviewed by Kratsios and may serve as the first challenges to be addressed by the mission. The Trump administration plans to review and update the list on an annual basis.

The executive order does not commit any funding to the project, but directs Kratsios to work with research agencies to launch funding opportunities or prizes to incentivize private-sector participation in the project, as well as develop competitive programs for research fellowships, internships, and apprenticeships related to the scientific priorities of the mission.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Kratsios said the Genesis Mission represents a “huge opportunity for the United States to continue to outpace the world in scientific discovery and innovation,” describing it as the “largest marshaling of the federal government’s scientific apparatus since the Apollo Project.”

Darío Gil and Stanford University physicist Kathryn Moler wrote about the promise of accelerating science using AI and the current barriers to realizing its potential in an op-ed published by Science the day after the Genesis Mission was announced, potentially providing some insight into Gil’s thinking about the mission.

“For AI to be a true partner in science, scientists must use it to produce verifiable results with data, methodologies, code, and outputs available for public scrutiny,” Gil and Moher wrote. “This requires researchers, institutions, academic journals, and funding agencies to foster open-source models, standardized tools, and ready-to-use data.”

Funding these efforts will require both public and private funding, said Gil and Moler, adding that “now is the time to pilot new forms of partnerships, such as joint investments in computing infrastructure, frameworks for data sharing, and collaborations focused on problems that develop new methods of AI-enabled discovery.”