America’s New AI Mission

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On November 24, Trump signed an executive order that instructed the US Department of Energy to create a platform where private AI companies can access federal scientific datasets to train their models.

The order is called the Genesis Mission, and it is framed as part of a race for technology dominance against China.

The Department of Energy has 60 days to create a list of 20 scientific and technology challenges that the country cares about, including nuclear fusion, quantum information science, and critical materials.

Then the agency is supposed to inventory all available federal computing resources and identify which data assets can be safely shared with companies like Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Google, and others.

Within nine months, the administration expects to demonstrate the platform's capability by having AI solve at least one of these national challenges.

National labs at Argonne and Oak Ridge already have partnerships with OpenAI and NVIDIA to host AI models that can process classified data on government computers. But the scale and formality of the operation has changed with this mission. The government is basically saying that access to federal scientific data is a tool for keeping America competitive in AI.

AI models trained on decades of government scientific research could accelerate discovery in energy, medicine, and materials science.

But some researchers are skeptical. They point out that general AI models, even very powerful ones, have built-in flaws that make it unclear whether they can actually generate fresh scientific insights rather than just pattern-match on existing data.