President Trump signed an executive order that bolsters artificial intelligence use for scientific discoveries.
The “Genesis Mission” is described as a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.” It seeks to “build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs,” while also bringing together “efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization.”
The Genesis Mission website says that the initiative, led by the Department of Energy and its 17 national laboratories, will “build the world’s most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery, strengthen national security, and drive energy innovation.” It will “transform how science is done,” the project declares.
Possible outcomes of Genesis Mission include fusion energy, new materials to quantum computing, medicines, and other areas.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 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.” He compared the effort to previous U.S. technological efforts, such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo mission, noting that the “brightest minds and industries have answered the call when their nation needed them.”
“America’s AI Action Plan,” released in July, declares that artificial intelligence will generate an “information revolution” enabling “new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”
“Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” the White House said at the time. Policies listed in the plan include exporting American AI around the world, developing data centers, supporting innovation by removing barriers, and preserving free speech in AI models.
