WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday signed an executive order creating a federal “Genesis mission” to support US dominance in artificial intelligence — with officials comparing it to the Apollo Program that landed men on the moon during the space race.
Administration officials said the initiative would “massively accelerate the rate of scientific breakthroughs” by using “unmatched computing capabilities and resources of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to unlock federal data sets.”
The National Labs will work with private companies to generate research that can be applied to healthcare, energy production and engineering, officials said.
The document orders Energy Secretary Chris Wright to “establish and operate the American Science and Security Platform (Platform) to serve as the infrastructure for the Mission.”
The platform will include “high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting large-scale model training, simulation, and inference,” the order says.
Wright is also ordered to determine federal research facilities “with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing” and to source “datasets from federally funded research, other agencies, academic institutions, and approved private-sector partners, as appropriate.”
The mission’s goal is “bringing together of scientific data sets of the top scientists across our 17 National Laboratories, across our United States university system and across the private sector businesses that are focused on science, engineering, innovation and energy,” an official said.
Officials who briefed reporters on the plan said that the initiative will respect copyright protections for published works.
“We’re going to be very careful to respect intellectual property rights,” one official said. “We’ve got to protect copyrights and sensitive information. That’ll be true as long as the mission goes on.”
“The Genesis Mission will use AI to automate experiment design, accelerate simulations and generate predictive models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics,” one official said.
“This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours, empowering scientists to test bolder hypotheses and discover breakthroughs currently unreachable.”
“With the power of AI, America is on the brink of a scientific revolution that will redefine American global scientific supremacy,” he added.
The president privately signed the document amid political backlash to a boom in data center construction, which has caused electricity prices to increase.
The Energy Department has entered into partnerships this month with chipmakers and computing giants like Nvidia and Dell, AMD and HPE to support the mission, officials said.
Those four companies said “we’re ready to come build super compute facilities at your National Labs right now,” said one official.
“We will see unbelievable advancements in health sciences,” a different official predicted.
“We’re going to understand the exact chemistry and biology that they are and how to combat [illnesses]. We’ve seen progress with that — relatively significant progress in the last five years. It’s nothing compared to what we’re going to see in the next five years.”
