Trump Executive Order Launches AI ‘Genesis Mission’

In its “AI Action Plan” released last summer, the Trump White House promised to “lead the creation of the world’s largest and highest quality AI-ready scientific datasets,” calling such information a “national strategic asset.” Consistent with that goal, today the administration launched what it calls a “historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project” that developed the first atomic bombs during World War II.

The “Genesis Mission,” described in an executive order issued Monday by President Donald Trump, is intended to develop “an integrated AI platform to harness federal scientific datasets” in order to train foundation models and “create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” The mission’s ultimate goals, the order says, are manifold:

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, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.

The order targets six priority domains: advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics.

The executive order taps the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios, to provide “general leadership” for the mission, and puts the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, in charge of implementing the Genesis Mission at the Department of Energy (DOE).

The Energy Secretary is directed to create an “American Science and Security Platform” to integrate “high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments,” and to develop “AI modeling and analysis frameworks,” “computational tools,” “domain-specific foundation models,” “secure access” to datasets, and “experimental and production tools to enable autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing in high-impact domains.” Computing resources may also be developed “through industry partners.”

The order contemplates various programs, competitions, and partnerships across federal agencies. It also calls on Kratsios to work with White House Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks to establish “mechanisms for agency collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities or scientific domain expertise,” presumably to include large technology firms.

Some aspects of the new “Genesis Mission” resemble the Biden-era 'Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology' (FASST) initiative at DOE. Launched in 2024, FASST also promised to coordinate national laboratories and their supercomputing infrastructure, and to integrate datasets.