Trump signs executive order launching AI initiative being compared to the Manhattan Project
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon launching a new federal effort to supercharge American artificial intelligence research, development and scientific applications. Unveiling the new “Genesis Mission” to support American efforts on AI, the order charts out a series of steps to expand computational resources, increase access to vast federal datasets and move toward impactful, real-world applications, particularly in scientific fields. “The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development,” the order states. Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the Office for Science and Technology Policy, will lead the effort.Among other measures, the order charges Secretary of Energy Chris Wright with establishing a new “American Science and Security Platform” to centralize the infrastructure required for the new push. According to the order, the platform will focus on providing researchers with the computing power and datasets necessary to train AI models. “The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs,” the order reads.The order opens the door to significantly increased public-private partnerships on AI development: within 90 days, the secretary of energy must identify systems and data available to support the program, including “resources available through industry partners.”AI systems require immense datasets in order to learn how to represent the real world. With its vast troves of information about Americans and their activities, the federal government has an enviable, but often decentralized and disorganized, gold mine of data untapped by AI companies to date. Monday’s order targets these barriers to data-sharing, giving Kratsios the responsibility to integrate “appropriate and available agency data and infrastructure into the Mission.”With increased computing resources and access to data, AI should then be applied to practical and critical scientific issues within 270 days, the order states. These areas of “science and technology challenges of national importance” include advanced manufacturing and robotics, biotechnology and nuclear fission and fusion.Monday’s announcement builds on the existing National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR). The NAIRR was created in 2020 by the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 to provide a shared, robust national research infrastructure to “accelerate AI and AI-powered discovery and innovation.”The NAIRR started as a pilot program, bringing together a coalition of federal agencies, ranging from the Department of Defense and NASA to the National Institutes of Health, and nongovernmental organizations like OpenAI, Google and Palantir, to set up a nationwide research community.Lynne Parker, who co-chaired the NAIRR task force as deputy chief technology officer and is now associate vice chancellor emerita at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said federal support for AI research is pivotal to future progress.“Government support for AI research builds the foundation for new breakthroughs and helps keep innovation aligned with the public interest,” Parker told NBC News. “We take for granted that new products appear regularly but seldom consider the decades of research that made them possible.”“Without long-term investment, we risk ceding leadership in the technologies that will define our economy, our security, and our daily lives,” she said. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July, emphasized the role of national research and development efforts, partially stemming from the NAIRR, “to foster the next generation of AI breakthroughs.”Monday’s executive order came weeks after the federal government announced new partnerships with some of America’s leading AI companies to build the next generation of AI-focused supercomputers. At the end of October, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a new partnership with AMD to launch two new supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to some of America’s leading federal AI researchers.“Winning the AI race requires new and creative partnerships that will bring together the brightest minds and industries American technology and science has to offer,” Secretary Wright said at the time in a statement. “Working with AMD and HPE, we’re bringing new capacity online faster than ever before, turning shared innovation into national strength, and proving that America leads when private-public partners build together,” Wright said, referencing Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s role in building the supercomputers.At the beginning of November, the Department of Energy announced further plans to expand Oak Ridge’s Leadership Computer Facility with high-powered Nvidia chips to tackle complex quantum-computing and AI-focused research.
