The Genesis Mission Executive Order: What It Does and How it Shapes the Future of AI-Enabled Scientific Research

Summary

• The Genesis Mission EO seeks to build a federal AI-enabled science platform by directing the Department of Energy to organize, plan, and begin assembling technical needs like computing resources, AI models, and data.
• DOE will identify 20+ scientific and technology challenges, map federal compute and data resources, and demonstrate an initial capability using existing infrastructure.
• As with many EOs, the order assigns and coordinates responsibilities, but cannot itself provide new funding or legal authority, so realizing the Genesis Mission’s full vision will depend on Congress, other agencies, and private sector partners.
• The effort plays to DOE’s strengths—the national labs, high-performance computing, diverse scientific capabilities—and gives the federal government an opportunity to build capacity to understand and govern advancing AI-enabled science.
• The EO creates a timely opportunity to align federal policy with the Genesis Mission and modernize oversight for potential dual-use concerns as AI, large datasets, and automated labs accelerate scientific research.

On November 24, the White House released an Executive Order launching the Genesis Mission—a bold plan to build a unified national AI-enabled science platform linking federal supercomputers, secure cloud networks, public and proprietary datasets, scientific foundation models, and even automated laboratory systems. The Administration frames the Genesis Mission as a Manhattan Project-scale scientific effort.

The EO lays out the organizational and planning framework for the Genesis Mission and tasks the Department of Energy with assembling the resources required to launch it. Working in highly consequential scientific domains—such as biotechnology, where dual-use safety and security issues routinely arise—gives the federal government a timely opportunity to build the oversight and governance capacity that will be needed as AI-enabled science advances.

1. What the EO Actually Does

The EO directs the DOE and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to spend the next year defining the scope of the Genesis Mission and proving what can be done using existing authority and appropriations. It’s important to keep in mind that an Executive Order cannot itself create new funding or new legal authority, so future steps will depend on Congressional action.

Mandated near-term tasks include:

1. Identify at least twenty “science and technology challenges of national importance” that must span priority domains such as biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, critical materials, quantum computing, nuclear science, and semiconductors. DOE will start, and OSTP will expand and finalize the list.
2. Inventory all relevant federal resources, including computing, data, networking, and automated experimentation capabilities.
3. Define initial datasets and AI models and develop a plan with “risk-based cybersecurity measures” that will enable incorporating data from federally funded research, other agencies, academia, and approved private sector partners.
4. Produce an initial demonstration of the “American Science and Security Platform,” using only currently available tools and legal authorities.

These are primarily coordination and planning tasks aimed at defining the scope of an integrated AI science platform and demonstrating what can be done with existing resources within DOE. The EO does not itself mandate building the full system. Rather, these steps begin the process of assembling underlying infrastructure. The EO outlines broad interagency coordination, but key details need to be worked out, including who can access the platform, how users will be vetted, and whether it will be open to broad scientific use or limited to national security-priority domains.

In that sense, the EO is best understood as establishing the groundwork for a future AI-enabled and automated science infrastructure—while its full build-out will depend on Congress, other agencies, and private sector partnerships.

2. Who Holds the Pen

The Genesis Mission envisions centralized leadership for interagency coordination, with two primary actors:

• DOE: Responsible for identifying and assembling the technical components: supercomputers, datasets, models, automated labs.
• OSTP: Responsible for government-wide coordination through the National Science and Technology Council.

Technical leadership will likely sit with Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, who oversees the DOE national labs and major research programs. Strategic coordination, including interactions with other agencies and industry, will likely run through Michael Kratsios, OSTP Director and Presidential Science Advisor.

The EO directs only DOE to take specific actions. What this means is that ultimately the interagency coordination is more aspirational, and likely will depend on Congressional actions to add or redirect funding to work on the Genesis Mission. At this point, the EO envisions DOE as the primary operator of the ultimate platform with OSTP shaping strategy. The practical impact of the Mission will largely depend on how these resources are ultimately shared and made accessible across agencies, which the EO leaves open for now.

3. The Goal: Accelerating High-Stakes Science

Here’s where the Genesis Mission may be most consequential. The EO envisions a platform that sits at the center of scientific domains with national and economic significance. These are areas where integrating AI models, different kinds of information from government and private databases, and being able to run lots of experiments using automation can provide high leverage.

For example, in biological research, an integrated AI-science platform could accelerate drug development, improve biomanufacturing, strengthen pandemic preparedness, tackle chronic disease, and support emerging industries that can help economic growth and allow the United States to maintain global leadership. DOE is well positioned to contribute here, given its national laboratories, high-performance computing, and experience managing large-scale scientific infrastructure.

The Genesis Mission EO suggests that the Administration expects the Mission to support research with high scientific value as well as complex security and safety considerations. While it doesn’t reference new or existing regulations, the EO requires DOE to operate the platform consistent with:

• classification rules,
• supply-chain security requirements,
• federal cybersecurity standards, and
• “uniform and stringent” data-access and data-management processes with strong vetting for external users.

A system that integrates large biological datasets, frontier-scale foundation models, and automated lab workflows could dramatically accelerate discovery. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that such capabilities can also intersect with longstanding dual-use concerns: areas where the same tools that advance beneficial research might also lower barriers to potential harms.

4. Why Governance Matters for the Genesis Mission

Biology offers a clear example of the kinds of oversight challenges that can arise as AI accelerates scientific research. AI and lab automation can lower barriers to manipulating or enhancing dangerous pathogens, which is often referred to as “gain-of-function” research.

Importantly, the launch of the Genesis Mission comes while key federal biosafety revisions are still in progress. In May, the White House issued Executive Order 14292, “Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research.” That EO called for strengthening oversight of certain high-consequence biological research, including gain of function. It imposed several tasks on OSTP, including:

• Revise or replace the 2024 Framework for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening.
• Replace the withdrawn 2024 dual-use and enhanced-pathogen oversight policy.
• Develop a strategy to “govern, limit, and track” gain-of-function and dual-use biological research outside federally funded environments.

Since then, there has been partial progress towards these goals, including NIH and USDA funding bans on gain-of-function research. But several other updates called for in EO 14292 have not been finalized. The Genesis Mission creates both an opportunity and a need to advance this work. By accelerating AI-enabled scientific research, the Mission heightens the importance of clear, modernized biosafety and biosecurity guidance—and gives the Administration a natural venue to advance it.

As DOE begins integrating advanced computation, large biological datasets, and automated experimentation, it becomes even more valuable to clarify how federal guidance should apply to AI-augmented research. The Genesis Mission may ultimately help spur the release of updated oversight frameworks and encourage broader policy discussions—including potential legislation—on how to manage dual-use research in the era of integrated AI for science platforms.

These issues aren’t limited to biology either. The Genesis Mission EO names nuclear science, quantum computing, advanced materials, and other domains where AI-accelerated discovery creates both major opportunities and critical governance issues.

5. The Hard Policy Questions Ahead

At first, the Genesis Mission will likely be a largely DOE-run effort limited to federal researchers and a small group of partners. But if it grows along the ambitious lines the EO lays out, managing who can access it—and how—becomes far more challenging. Once integrated AI-driven systems can design, optimize, or automate significant parts of scientific research, regulation becomes both urgent and harder to enforce in a uniform way:

• Federal rules can clearly govern federally funded research.
• But what about private-sector scientists who combine federal AI models or datasets with independently conducted wet-lab work?
• And what about academic or corporate AI-scientific platforms—built outside federal systems—that also integrate scientific data, advanced models, and automated labs?

These private and academic systems may be entirely outside federal oversight, complicating attempts to build coherent guardrails.

If the Genesis Mission succeeds, it will generate substantial new scientific data that will help train more capable models and enable new research pathways. At the same time, access to more powerful models and broader datasets will increase the importance of developing effective policies for data governance, user access, and managing research across the government and with the private sector.

6. Bottom Line

The Genesis Mission sets an ambitious vision for a unified AI-enabled science platform within the federal government. Its success will depend on future funding, interagency participation, and sustained follow-through. But even at this early planning stage, the EO brings core policy issues to the surface: oversight, data governance, access rules, and how to manage research that cuts across agencies and private sector entities.

As DOE and OSTP begin work on the Genesis Mission, it also creates a timely opportunity for the federal government to update dual-use oversight frameworks, such as in biosafety as called for by EO 14292, and build governance structures needed for AI-accelerated science.