The AI Manhattan Project: Inside America’s Genesis Mission
How the Genesis Mission Signals the Most Aggressive U.S. Science Mobilization Since Apollo
Editorial Team (ET)November 25, 2025
On November 24, 2025, the White House quietly dropped the kind of executive order that historians will mark as the moment the United States decided to win the 21st century the old-fashioned way: with overwhelming national firepower aimed directly at the hardest problems in science.
Dubbed the Genesis Mission, the directive turns the Department of Energy into the nerve center of what President Trump called “the largest mobilization of American scientific power since the Apollo program.” The goal is brutally simple: fuse America’s supercomputers, federal datasets, and national laboratories into a single AI-driven platform that can automate breakthrough discovery in biotechnology, advanced materials, nuclear energy, quantum computing, semiconductors, and space technology.
This is not another blue-ribbon commission or a request for more studies. The order sets hard deadlines: twenty “grand challenge” missions must be selected within sixty days, the first closed-loop AI agents and robotic laboratories must be running within nine months, and the entire American Science and Security Platform must reach initial operating capability by late 2026.
At its core, Genesis rests on three pillars that already exist but have never been wired together at this scale. First, the Department of Energy’s seventeen national laboratories, home to the world’s fastest supercomputer (Frontier at Oak Ridge) and a dozen other exascale-class machines either online or under construction. Second, decades of federally funded scientific data—genomes, climate records, particle-collider results, materials databases—that dwarf anything in private hands. Third, a new generation of AI foundation models trained specifically on scientific problems, paired with autonomous agents that can design experiments, dispatch robotic labs, and iterate in real time.
