Trump launches “Genesis Mission” to fast-track AI science push

Donald Trump has unveiled a new national drive to harness artificial intelligence for scientific discovery, framing it as a moonshot-style project designed to keep the US at the front of global innovation.

By executive order signed on Monday, Trump established “The Genesis Mission”, described by the White House as a sweeping effort to unite America’s 17 national laboratories into a single cooperative research system. The plan centres on creating a “closed-loop AI experimentation platform” that links supercomputers, data and emerging technologies to accelerate breakthroughs.

Priority areas include nuclear fusion, semiconductors, critical materials and space exploration, with the administration openly comparing the initiative to the Apollo programme. The goal, officials say, is to target the “greatest scientific challenges of our time” with AI as the core engine.

White House science adviser Michael Kratsios called the programme a “revolutionary approach” to research.

“The Genesis Mission connects world-class scientific data with the most advanced American AI to unlock breakthroughs in medicine, energy, materials science, and beyond,” he said.

Major tech players are already on board. Nvidia and AI startup Anthropic confirmed their participation, with Nvidia describing the project as an unprecedented integration of government, industry and academia.

“Uniting the National Labs, USG, industry, and academia, this effort will connect America’s leading supercomputers, AI systems, and next-generation quantum machines into the most complex scientific instrument ever built – accelerating breakthroughs in energy, discovery, and national security,” the company said.

The initiative fits into Trump’s wider strategy of loosening regulations to speed up AI development. He has repeatedly criticised state-level controls, pushing instead for a unified national framework.

“Overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Growth Engine,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes.”