On Monday President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at accelerating science using artificial intelligence, an effort dubbed the “Genesis Mission.”
The order frames the race for global technological dominance in AI as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project,” referring to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II. The order comes at a moment when federal agencies have seen massive cuts to research grants and funding—and Trump’s order does not set out a defined budget for Genesis.
National security, scientific discovery and energy innovation are all highlighted as top priorities in the order, which states that federal scientific datasets such as those managed by NASA, the National Institutes of Health and other government science agencies will be critical to this work. Together, these add up to many billions of measurements, images and computer simulations about everything from the deep ocean to outer space to the human genome.
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In a press call on Monday, science adviser to the president Michael Kratsios called the Genesis Mission “the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program,” CBS News reported.
“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. This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours, empowering scientists to test bolder hypotheses and discover breakthroughs currently unreachable,” Kratsios said.
Trump’s order gives the Department of Energy 60 days to identify 20 high-priority challenges to tackle. It has 90 days to catalog all the computing resources at its disposal, 120 days to set out a plan for harnessing data from both federal sources and other research institutes and 270 days to show that its plan can make progress on at least one of the identified challenges.
Top priorities for these challenges include breakthroughs in fusion energy, advanced nuclear reactors, electric-grid modernization, new materials, quantum computing and lifesaving medicines, according to a DOE webpage. A central goal of the mission is “to double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade” by augmenting and not replacing human scientists.
Given the vast sums of money that are already pouring into AI, it remains unclear how much this effort will cost. The DOE lists Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google as collaborators in the effort, although what their exact contribution will be is also unknown.