The 2025 Genesis Mission order set up an AI platform for US science; the White House now cites over $5 billion

On November 24, 2025, at the White House, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14363, “Launching the Genesis Mission”. It declared a national effort to apply artificial intelligence to scientific discovery, which the order compared in urgency to the Manhattan Project, and put the Department of Energy and its national laboratories at the center. Almost a year later the program has spread across government: in July 2026 the White House announced more than $5 billion in federal commitments, with more than 15 agencies taking part, and the Energy Department has picked nearly 300 research projects.

What the order set up

The order makes the Secretary of Energy responsible for running the mission and the President's science adviser, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, responsible for overall leadership and coordination of other agencies through the National Science and Technology Council. Its core is the American Science and Security Platform, which the Energy Department is to build and operate. The order lists what it should bring together: national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud computing for training and running large models, AI agents that explore designs and automate research workflows, simulation and prediction tools, foundation models for individual scientific fields, secure access to proprietary, federally curated and open datasets, and robotic facilities for AI-directed experiments and manufacturing.

The order describes federal scientific datasets as the world's largest such collection, built up over decades of public investment. The order names six priority domains for the first challenges: advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics. It also tells the energy secretary to set rules on ownership, licensing and commercialization of intellectual property from the mission, including inventions from AI-directed experiments, and strict vetting of outside users.

The order's deadlines

Everything in the order is to be carried out subject to the availability of appropriations, and it creates no enforceable rights. The initial-capability demonstration in particular is worded as something the secretary must seek, consistent with law and available funding.

What has happened since

On July 22, 2026, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, unveiled more than $5 billion in federal commitments and a set of National Science and Technology Challenges spanning health care, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing and affordability. The challenges range from finding drivers of childhood cancer with Health and Human Services data and Energy Department supercomputers, and AI models of the electric grid, to mining more than 150 petabytes of NASA telescope and satellite data and building autonomous laboratories. Agencies from NASA and the National Science Foundation to the departments of Agriculture, Interior and War are contributing data, facilities or funding, the White House said. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 278 projects had been selected that day.

On October 8, 2026, the Energy Department added 12 Phase II awards totaling $159 million, including a digital twin for Commonwealth Fusion Systems' SPARC fusion device and projects at MIT, Harvard and several national laboratories, plus six Phase I awards; it said the first-year cohort now numbers 297 projects. The department now describes the mission as harnessing “super intelligence” for science and says it is helping prepare 100,000 American science and technology professionals over the next decade. The White House said in July that the mission aims to double America's research and development output.

Questions from Congress

When the House Science, Space and Technology Committee held a hearing on the mission on December 10, 2025, with Energy Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil as witness, the committee's ranking Democrat, Zoe Lofgren of California, said she had long backed faster development of fusion energy but objected that Wright had not testified before the committee. She called for accountability for what she described as the “slap-dash, extremely politicized termination of billions in DOE awards” made through merit-based processes. Gil, for his part, said in July 2026 that the mission brings together researchers, institutions and technology partners “to build the next generation of scientific capability.”

What comes next

The next fixed point is the energy secretary's first annual report, due within one year of the order. It must cover the platform's operating status, integration across the national laboratories, user and student participation, measurable scientific results, and the outcomes of public-private partnerships. The order also requires the list of challenges to be reviewed every year. The White House said in July that more announcements on industry, philanthropy and international participation would follow.