Key takeaways President Trump signed an executive order on Monday establishing the Genesis Mission, a federal initiative to accelerate artificial intelligence research for scientific discovery. The De...
The initiative directs the Department of Energy and its 17 national laboratories to build an integrated AI platform that will provide researchers access to vast federal datasets, advanced supercomputing capabilities, and scientific facilities.
Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the Office for Science and Technology Policy, will lead the overall effort.
The executive order aims to leverage what it describes as the world's largest collection of federal scientific datasets, accumulated over decades of government investment, to train AI foundation models and create AI agents for scientific research.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright will establish a new American Science and Security Platform to centralize the computational infrastructure required for the initiative.
"The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development," the executive order states.
Within 90 days, the Secretary of Energy must identify systems and data available to support the program, including resources available through industry partners.
The order explicitly opens the door to significantly increased public-private partnerships on AI development.
"The private sector has launched artificial intelligence at huge scale, but with a little bit different focus – on language, on business, on processes, on consumer services," Wright told reporters Monday. "What we're doing here is just pivoting those efforts to focus on scientific discovery, engineering advancements."
The executive order sets a timeline requiring AI to be applied to practical scientific challenges within 270 days.
Priority areas include advanced manufacturing and robotics, biotechnology, and nuclear fission and fusion research.
"By fusing massive federal data sets, advanced supercomputing capabilities, and world-leading scientific facilities, the Genesis mission will use AI to automate experiment design, accelerate simulation, and generate protective models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics," Kratsios said. "This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours, empowering scientists to test bolder hypotheses and discover breakthroughs currently unreachable."
The administration has compared the Genesis Mission to the Manhattan Project and described it as the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo space program in the 1960s and 1970s.
Monday's announcement builds on the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, created in 2020 to provide shared national research infrastructure.
The NAIRR pilot program brought together federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health, along with private organizations like OpenAI, Google, and Palantir.
Lynne Parker, who co-chaired the NAIRR task force as deputy chief technology officer and is now associate vice chancellor emerita at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, emphasized the importance of government support for AI research.
"Government support for AI research builds the foundation for new breakthroughs and helps keep innovation aligned with the public interest," Parker told NBC News. "Without long-term investment, we risk ceding leadership in the technologies that will define our economy, our security, and our daily lives."
The executive order follows recent partnerships between the federal government and leading AI companies.
In late October, the Department of Energy announced a partnership with AMD to launch two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In early November, the department announced plans to expand Oak Ridge's Leadership Computer Facility with high-powered Nvidia chips.
"Winning the AI race requires new and creative partnerships that will bring together the brightest minds and industries American technology and science has to offer," Wright said in an October statement announcing the AMD partnership.
"Working with AMD and HPE, we're bringing new capacity online faster than ever before, turning shared innovation into national strength, and proving that America leads when private-public partners build together."
White House officials indicated that companies, including Nvidia and Dell, have expressed interest in participating in the Genesis Mission.
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