Trump admin launches AI-led research, data collaboration in push for global tech dominance

A new “national effort” will speed up scientific research and discovery through artificial intelligence, President Donald Trump announced in an executive order Monday.

“The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership,” the order reads. 

The Genesis Mission will create “scientific foundation models and power robotic laboratories,” according to the order. 

Not only can AI speed up data processing and analysis, it can help create “novel materials” to advance study, the White House fact sheet explained.  

“Research that once took years could now take weeks or months,” the White House said. 

The order compared the “race for global technology dominance,” specifically regarding AI, to the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb, securing the subsequent end of World War II. The order directed responsibilities for the Genesis Mission to the Department of Energy, which was founded as a result of the Manhattan Project, according to the order. 

Trump tasked U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with uniting the department’s National Laboratories, American researchers and databases into “one cooperative system.” Wright said this effort will secure America as the “global leader” of AI and “usher in a new golden era of American discovery.” 

Wright assigned Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil to head the mission, according to the department’s press release.  

“The Genesis Mission marks a defining moment for the next era of American science,” Gil said. “We are linking the nation’s most advanced facilities, data, and computing into one closed-loop system to create a scientific instrument for the ages, an engine for discovery that doubles R&D [research and development] productivity and solves challenges once thought impossible.”   

The initiative will focus on three main responsibilities: ensuring America’s energy dominance worldwide, advancing scientific discovery and strengthening national security, the DOE’s press release said.  

The Genesis Mission continues Trump’s quest for global AI dominance through his emphasis on AI for students and pediatric cancer cures, as well as restriction of woke or discriminatory AI, as demonstrated in his previous multiple executive orders.  

“From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity,” Monday’s executive order says. “Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth.”