The AI race isn’t just being run between companies — entire nations are getting involved.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on November 24, 2025, establishing the Genesis Mission, a coordinated national effort to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence. The initiative aims to harness the federal government’s vast collection of scientific datasets to train foundation models and create AI agents capable of automating research workflows and testing new hypotheses.
The order positions the Genesis Mission as comparable in urgency to the Manhattan Project, bringing together resources from national laboratories, universities, private companies, and existing research infrastructure. The initiative seeks to advance American dominance in AI development while addressing challenges in areas like advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, quantum computing, and semiconductors.
Building the American Science and Security Platform
At the heart of the mission is the American Science and Security Platform, which the Department of Energy will establish and operate. The platform will integrate high-performance computing resources, including DOE supercomputers and cloud-based AI environments, with AI modeling frameworks and domain-specific foundation models across scientific disciplines.
The platform will provide secure access to federally curated and open scientific datasets, along with synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources, while maintaining classification, privacy, and intellectual property protections. The system will also support experimental and production tools for autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing.
The Secretary of Energy has 90 days to identify available federal computing, storage, and networking resources, and 270 days to demonstrate an initial operating capability for at least one national science challenge.
Interagency Coordination and Private Sector Partnerships
The order establishes mechanisms for collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities. These partnerships will include cooperative research agreements, user facility partnerships, and standardized frameworks for data-use and model-sharing, with clear policies for intellectual property ownership, licensing, and commercialization.
To ensure security, the order mandates stringent vetting procedures for users and collaborators, along with cybersecurity standards for non-federal entities accessing the platform’s resources. All operations must comply with classification, privacy, and export-control requirements.
The initiative will also support competitive programs for research fellowships and internships focused on applying AI to scientific domains, with participants gaining access to the platform at DOE national laboratories and other federal research facilities.
The Secretary of Energy will submit annual reports on the platform’s operational status, user engagement, research outcomes, and public-private partnership activities, allowing the administration to track progress and adjust priorities as national needs evolve.
US-China AI Race
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to observers that US and China are fiercely competing for dominance in AI. The US created nearly all the research breakthroughs that led to the current AI revolution, has all the biggest AI companies, and creates the best chips for AI. China, though, now has the best open-source models, which are inching ever closer to the ones that frontier US labs are able to create, and is looking to develop its own chips. Crucially, a large percentage of researchers and employees at top US companies are of Chinese origin, and they could slowly return to China to build its AI companies. The Chinese government has a big part to play in the country’s AI progress, ranging from funding companies to building infrastructure, but the US is looking to compete, first with its AI action plan, and now with the Genesis mission. It remains to be seen how the Genesis Mission fares, but government executives orders on AI at regular intervals suggests how big the stakes the US government believes are in regards to maintaining AI dominance.