November 25, 2025
2 minute read
US launches Apollo-like mission to use artificial intelligence and big data for scientific discovery
A new federal initiative aims to accelerate scientific discovery by combining artificial intelligence with large federal data sets.
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed decree aimed at accelerating the development of science using artificial intelligenceproject, called “Mission of Genesis”.
The decree states that the race for global technological dominance in AI is “comparable in urgency and ambition to Manhattan Project“, referring to the development atomic bomb during World War II. The order came as federal agencies saw massive cuts in research grants and funding— and Trump's order does not set a specific budget for Genesis.
National Security, Scientific Discovery, and Energy Innovation everything is highlighted as top priorities The order says federal scientific datasets, such as those managed by NASA, the National Institutes of Health and other government science agencies, will be critical to this work. Collectively, they account for many billions of measurements, images and computer simulations of everything from the deep ocean to outer space to the human genome.
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In a press conference Monday, Michael Kratsios, the president's science adviser, called the Genesis mission “the largest pool of federal science resources since the Apollo program.” CBS News reports..
“The Genesis mission will use artificial intelligence to automate experimental design, speed up simulations, and create protective models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics. This will reduce discovery timelines from years to days or even hours, giving scientists the ability to test bolder hypotheses and discover breakthroughs that are currently out of reach,” Kratsios said.
Trump's order gives the Energy Department 60 days to identify 20 high-priority issues that need to be addressed. He has 90 days to catalog all the computing resources at his disposal, 120 days to develop a plan to use data from both federal sources and other research institutions, and 270 days to show that his plan can make progress on at least one of the identified problems.
Top priorities in addressing these challenges include breakthroughs in fusion energyadvanced nuclear reactorsmodernizing power grids, new materials, quantum computing and life-saving drugs, according to Ministry of Education web page. The core mission goal is to “double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade” by adding, rather than replacing, human scientists.
Given the huge amounts of money already being poured into AI, it remains unclear how much these efforts will cost. The Energy Department lists Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google as contributors to the project, although their exact contributions are also unknown.
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