On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order launching the "Genesis Mission," a national artificial intelligence science initiative that officials describe as the largest federal research endeavor since the Manhattan Project.
The directive instructs federal agencies to integrate government datasets, supercomputers from national laboratories, and new AI systems. According to the administration, these integrated resources will accelerate scientific discovery across multiple domains and strengthen U.S. technological competitiveness.
The order also establishes a centralized system called the "U.S. Science and Security Platform." The Department of Energy (DOE) stated that this platform will link supercomputers, secure cloud-based AI environments, scientific datasets, simulation tools, and automated laboratory systems to support model training and AI-guided experimentation.
"The Genesis Mission will unify our nation’s research and development capabilities—bringing together the exceptional scientists at U.S. National Laboratories, pioneering American companies, world-renowned universities, and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, manufacturing facilities, and national security sites—to dramatically accelerate the development and application of artificial intelligence," the order reads.
Officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the DOE explained that the Genesis Mission aims to reduce research timelines from "years to days or even hours" by combining federal data with neural networks capable of generating predictions, guiding experiments, and running simulations.
They emphasized that the initiative will uphold copyright protections and national security restrictions. Open data will be accessible to researchers, while proprietary or classified materials will be restricted to authorized users only.
"We operate 28 user facilities and support 40,000 scientists and engineers. Some of these datasets are proprietary and shared bilaterally with each partner," said a White House official. "We also hold some of the nation’s most sensitive and classified datasets, which are not available to third parties. All three categories of data will be leveraged, and we will continue to advance partnerships based on each category."
The executive order mandates that the DOE apply federal classification, export control, and cybersecurity standards to the new platform and vet external researchers or companies seeking access.
When asked how the administration plans to prevent errors in AI models used under the Genesis Mission, a White House official explained that every prediction will be validated against experimental results.
"These models will generate predictions and formulate plans," the official told Decrypt. "If those predictions don’t align with results from scientific instruments, then the predictions are incorrect. Through this iterative process, we’ll achieve the accuracy needed to advance the Genesis Mission."
Although the term 'artificial intelligence' was used broadly during the briefing, the official clarified that the government is not referring to consumer-facing chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok.
"When we talk about AI, we mean systems capable of encoding knowledge from physics, chemistry, and engineering into extremely large neural networks," they said. "These networks go beyond traditional large language models. We’ll integrate them with physics-, chemistry-, and engineering-based models."
Trump’s AI Initiatives
The Genesis Mission follows several AI-related actions taken earlier in 2025. In January, the White House rescinded a Biden-era directive requiring companies to submit safety testing and evaluation results for their AI models, citing that the policy hindered innovation. In July, the administration moved to ban so-called 'woke AI,' directing federal agencies to support the development of ideologically neutral AI systems.
The government has also restructured federal regulatory bodies to prioritize evaluation and competitiveness over the broader safety-testing frameworks employed by the previous administration. Most recently, in an effort to preempt state-level AI regulations, the administration indicated it is considering issuing an executive order to establish a federal AI regulatory framework.
Monday’s directive orders national laboratories to expand existing supercomputing capabilities and connect them directly to scientific instruments, enabling AI systems to generate and validate predictions in real time. Officials noted that the U.S. already operates several of the world’s top-ranked machines.
Under the order, the DOE has 90 days to identify federal and cloud-based computing resources, 120 days to select initial datasets and models, and 240 days to evaluate robotic and automated lab systems. The department must demonstrate initial operational capability within 270 days.
According to the White House, private-sector interest in the Genesis Mission has been "overwhelming." An official noted that companies including Nvidia, Dell, and AMD have agreed to expand AI-focused computing capacity at national laboratories.
In response to concerns about rising power demands from data centers, an official stated that the increased load will drive new electricity generation capacity and ultimately lower per-unit costs. The long-term effect, they said, will be "lower electricity prices for Americans and a more reliable grid."
"Ultimately, the build-out of AI and hyperscale computing will become a force for reducing electricity prices in the U.S. and enhancing the reliability of our power grid," they added.
The order also directs agencies to propose new scientific challenges and create a coordination structure for research, data access, and partnerships among government, academia, and industry. The National Science and Technology Council will lead this effort, supported by the Federal Data and AI Council.
It also establishes research fellowships at national laboratories and requires the DOE to submit annual reports on platform performance, research progress, participation levels, and collaborative outcomes.
"At this pivotal moment, the challenges we face demand a historic national effort whose urgency and ambition rival the Manhattan Project—critical to our victory in World War II—and lay a foundational cornerstone for the Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Laboratories," the order states.
