Genesis Mission To Accelerate AI For Scientific Discovery Launched
President Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order establishing the Genesis Mission, a national initiative to apply artificial intelligence across the research enterprise and dramatically speed the pace of scientific discovery.
At the center of the plan is the Department of Energy (DOE), which has been tasked with building a closed-loop AI experimentation platform. This platform will link America’s top-tier supercomputers with unique federal data assets to train scientific foundation models and drive automated, robotic laboratories—creating a continuous feedback system where AI generates hypotheses, designs experiments, executes them in robotic labs, and learns from results in near real time.
The White House framed the effort as a way to harness the combined power of the National Laboratories, the nation’s brightest researchers, its most capable computing infrastructure, and vast stores of scientific data into a coordinated, interoperable system for discovery.
To ensure coherence across agencies, the Executive Order instructs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) to coordinate the initiative and to integrate data and infrastructure from across the federal government. The Secretary of Energy, the APST, and the Special Advisor for AI & Crypto will jointly engage universities and private-sector innovators to support and expand the Genesis Mission’s capabilities.
How the platform changes research
The closed-loop approach aims to compress the cycle of scientific work—from hypothesis to validated result—from years to weeks or months. AI models would propose and refine experiments; robotic systems would execute them with high throughput; and the resulting data would continuously retrain the models. The approach is designed to boost reproducibility, accelerate iteration, and scale up exploration of large scientific search spaces that are impractical for humans alone.
Priority domains
The initiative targets breakthrough challenges with outsized impact on national, economic, and health security. Priority areas include:
- Biotechnology and biomanufacturing
- Critical materials discovery, processing, and recycling
- Nuclear energy, including both fission and fusion
- Space exploration technologies
- Quantum information science
- Semiconductors and microelectronics
Why now
Administration officials say the Genesis Mission aims to significantly increase the productivity and impact of federal R&D over the next decade. Despite rising research budgets since the 1990s, indicators of scientific output—such as new drug approvals and per-researcher productivity—have shown signs of stagnation. The White House argues that weaving AI directly into the scientific process can reverse those trends by making discovery faster, cheaper, and more scalable.
What AI will do in the lab
AI systems are expected to support and automate core scientific tasks, including:
- Generating and refining models of protein structures and other complex biological systems
- Designing novel materials and predicting their properties
- Planning, optimizing, and analyzing experiments at scale
- Aggregating disparate datasets and synthesizing new, higher-value data
By unifying computation, data, and automated experimentation, the mission seeks to turn today’s months-long or years-long research programs into timelines measured in weeks.
What to watch
Key milestones to track include the architecture of the DOE’s AI platform, policies for secure and privacy-preserving data sharing, access to high-performance computing for researchers and startups, and standards for safety, reproducibility, and intellectual property in AI-driven labs. Collaboration with academia and industry will be critical to ensure the platform accelerates discovery while maintaining scientific rigor and trust.
If successful, the Genesis Mission could redefine how the U.S. conducts publicly funded research—moving from siloed projects to an integrated, AI-native system designed to explore, test, and learn at unprecedented speed.
