US President Trump has ordered the launch of the "Genesis Mission," a national effort to use AI to drive scientific discoveries, with the aim of strengthening America's technological leadership and global competitiveness.

In an [1]executive order published on Monday, the President declared that the country is in a race for global technology dominance, and so there is a need for a nationwide AI initiative, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

The Genesis Mission will aim to develop an AI platform using federal government datasets to train scientific foundation models. The executive order also calls for the creation of AI agents capable of testing new hypotheses, automating research workflows, and ultimately delivering scientific breakthroughs.

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Among the goals of the initiative is to "secure energy dominance," using machine learning to try to solve problems around making nuclear fusion work as well as grid modernization to provide enough energy to meet anticipated future demand.

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It falls to the Department of Energy (DOE) to lead this national project, as it oversees more physical science research than any other federal agency, via its network of National Laboratories.

Although Trump's executive order gives Secretary of Energy Chris Wright responsibility for implementing Genesis, he has delegated this to his under-secretary for science, Dr Darío Gil, a former senior VP and director of research at IBM.

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The DOE says it will build an integrated discovery platform by linking together the supercomputers and other facilities at its 17 National Laboratories with industry and academia drawing on the expertise of roughly 40,000 scientists, engineers, and technical staff.

No mention has been made of funding for this project, so it seems likely that the DOE is expected to cover the Genesis Mission from existing budgets. We queried the agency about this and will update if we get an answer.

The executive order sets a deadline of 90 days for the DOE to identify federal compute resources available to support the initiative, including those on-premises at the agency's sites and cloud-based systems, plus resources available through industry partners. Another 30 days later, it is expected to have identified a body of initial government datasets and model assets for use in the project.

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But before all that, the DOE is tasked with submitting to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) a list of at least 20 science and technology challenges of national importance that have the potential to be addressed by Genesis.

[7]Anthropic reduces model misbehavior by endorsing cheating

[8]Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

[9]Researchers get inside the mind of bots, find out what texts they trained on

[10]Big Red borrows a lot of green, hopes AI will put it in the black

Within 270 days (nine months) of Trump issuing his executive order, the DOE is expected to demonstrate an initial operating capability of the platform for at least one of the scientific challenges identified.

These could relate to nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum computing, critical materials, advanced manufacturing, or semiconductors and microelectronics.

"The Genesis Mission marks a defining moment for the next era of American science," Gil said in a canned statement.

"We are linking the nation's most advanced facilities, data, and computing into one closed-loop system to create a scientific instrument for the ages, an engine for discovery that doubles R&D productivity and solves challenges once thought impossible."

AI is clearly important to the US economy as investments related to AI infrastructure and development of new models appear to be the only thing keeping the country out of a recession, as The Register [11]reported last month .

But it isn't just us – the [12]Wall Street Journal said on Monday that investment in AI accounted for as much as half of the growth in gross domestic product in the first six months of the year, meaning that the economy is dependent on AI.

"It's the only source of investment right now," it quotes Stephen Juneau, an economist at Bank of America, as saying. Small wonder there are growing concerns over what may happen if the bubble bursts. ®

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[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/11/launching-the-genesis-mission/

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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/24/anthropic_model_misbehavior/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/23/bossware_monitor_remote_employees/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/21/researchers_better_ai_model_memory_probe/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/21/oracle_ai_adventures/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/24/ai_investment_us_recession/

[12] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-the-u-s-economy-became-hooked-on-ai-spending-4b6bc7ff

[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/