The US White House has launched the Genesis Mission, a plan to feed scientific federal government datasets into artificial intelligence models.

The Department of Energy (DOE)-led project is meant to create and train AI agents and scientific foundation models to speed up scientific progress.

"We will harness for the benefit of our nation the revolution underway in computing, and build on decades of innovation in semiconductors and high-performance computing," President Donald Trump said in an executive order launching the initiative.

"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, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership."

The program will use DOE supercomputers, cloud-based AI computing environments, and other Federal computing resources.

The order calls for the exact compute, storage, and networking resources to be made available within 90 days, including "resources available through industry partners."

Within 120 days, the DOE Secretary is expected to identify a set of initial data and model assets, including digitization, standardization, metadata, and provenance tracking. They will also develop a plan to ingest datasets from federally funded research, other agencies, academic institutions, and approved private-sector partners.

Then within 240 days, the Secretary will review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities "with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed."

By the end of the first 270 days, the Secretary is set to demonstrate an initial operating capability of the American Science and Security Platform for at least one of the national science and technology challenges listed in the order.

Those challenges include advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics.

Private companies are increasingly looking to use scientific data to build AI systems that will then run their own scientific experiments. Among them are Periodic Labs, which expects to build its own autonomous lab, and Jeff Bezos' secretive Project Prometheus.