President Trump launched a United States effort to use AI to speed up scientific breakthroughs.
What’s new: The Genesis Mission, established by an executive order, directs the Department of Energy to integrate its 17 national labs and some of the country’s most powerful supercomputers to tackle research on areas that range from energy to medicine. Government researchers will work with private-sector partners, including Anthropic, Nvidia, and OpenAI, to train models on proprietary federal datasets and use AI to generate and run experiments.
How it works: The Energy Department will create an AI platform that provides access to government data and enables federal agencies, research labs, and companies to collaborate in building scientific foundation models and AI agents. It will also organize prize competitions, fellowships, partnerships, and funding opportunities that bring these communities together, coordinating diverse government, academic, and private resources that typically remain separate during peacetime. The project is the “largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program,” Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Bloomberg.
- Automation: The goal is to train AI models to conceive and conduct scientific research using robotic labs that allow for varying degrees of human involvement.
- Focus: The mission identifies six areas of research focus: biotechnology, manufacturing, materials, nuclear fission, quantum information science, and semiconductors.
- Goals: The project aims to (i) boost the pace of scientific discovery, (ii) protect national security, (iii) find paths to lower-cost energy, and (iv) increase the return on government investment for taxpayers.
- Funding: No new funding has been allocated so far, as is standard with U.S. executive orders. Agencies will start with existing resources, and Congress may approve additional spending.
- Nvidia will build 7 new supercomputers for the government labs, CEO Jensen Huang said, and AMD, Dell, and Nvidia have agreed to build new facilities within the government labs, The New York Times reported.
Behind the news: In scientific research, AI is evolving from a passive tool into an active collaborator that can manage the cycle of scientific discovery from hypothesis to results.
- Google’s AI co-scientist, a multi-agent system designed to generate in-depth research proposals, has demonstrated its capability to generate novel proposals for biomedical research. It identified drug candidates to repurpose for leukemia and liver fibrosis that were subsequently validated in labs.
- AI Scientist, an agentic workflow that directs large language models to generate ideas for AI research, produce code to test them, and document the enquiry, showcased the ability of LLMs to produce AI research papers by ideating, testing, and documenting experimental results.
- RoboChem, an integrated robotic lab developed by the University of Amsterdam, outperformed human chemists in optimizing chemical synthesis, boosting yield and throughput in experimental runs. In earlier work, researchers at the University of Liverpool trained a mobile robot arm to navigate a lab, operate equipment, handle samples, and obtain results far faster than a human scientist.
- AI-powered search engines like Consensus and Scite streamline the ability to find and summarize scientific literature by synthesizing vast amounts of peer-reviewed research.
Yes, but: The Genesis Mission depends on data, yet the federal government has systematically degraded its capacity to collect it. The White House has cut funding for weather data collection by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suspended collection of health data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and shut down several facilities responsible for gathering and curating government data, Politico reported. Lack of large, current datasets could blunt both AI and humanity’s ability to understand the world.
Why it matters: The U.S. push to apply AI to scientific research and coordinate federal, academic, and private resources is a direct response to the investment and advances China has been making in AI, officials said. China is making strides in many areas of science and technology including quantum computing and battery technology, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. For the AI industry, the Genesis Mission’s plan to launch competitions and other financial incentives to participate in new research efforts related to strategic goals and security is encouraging.
We’re thinking: Autonomous systems that produce, vet, and execute research ideas have shown intriguing progress. With adequate funding and access to data, a partnership between industry, academia, and the Department of Energy presents an exciting opportunity to accelerate it.