White House launches Genesis Mission to spur AI with federal assets

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday evening launching the Genesis Mission, a new initiative to build an artificial intelligence experimentation platform based on federal government datasets. The ultimate goal is to create and train AI agents and scientific foundation models to accelerate scientific progress. 

“The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization,” the White House release said. 

The Department of Energy will helm the initiative and draw on resources like its network of National Labs and their world-class supercomputers. The Energy secretary will be responsible for implementing Genesis across the agency.

An American Science and Security Platform will function as the core infrastructure to support Genesis operations, including high-performance computing, AI modeling and analysis, running domain-specific foundation models and working with experimental tools, among other uses.

The platform will be used by agencies participating in Genesis and will include a particular focus on the top 20 science and technology challenges deemed to be of national importance by the Energy secretary, “including biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, space exploration, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics,” per a White House fact sheet.

Access to federal data will be crucial for Genesis. The Energy secretary will also be tasked with identifying what federal data is best for the initiative, including digitization, standardization, metadata and provenance tracking information. 

Participating agencies will be allowed to collaborate with external entities like private companies and academic institutions. Some experts have already applauded the effort. 

“With the Genesis Mission, the United States will make accelerating scientific discovery with AI a whole-of-government priority. Congress has already endorsed this agenda with the bipartisan American Science Acceleration Project, and now the administration has committed to the same direction,” the Center for Data Innovation’s senior policy manager, Hodan Omaar, said in a statement. “A faster, more efficient research system will stretch every federal dollar further and cut years from development timelines.”

Trump has previously spoken about the U.S. being the nation with the strongest AI ecosystem, with China trailing as a close second. The administration’s AI policy posture has predominantly focused on applying a light-touch regulatory approach under federal law in a bid to spur private sector innovation.