The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government’s scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table.
The Department of Energy, which is leading Trump’s Genesis Mission to spur a nationwide effort to incorporate AI into the scientific process at a Manhattan Project-like scale, announced the list of “26 science and technology challenges of national importance” on Thursday. Each was selected, the DoE said, for its potential to deliver actual benefits to America and speed up the Genesis Mission’s general pace of advancement.
“These challenges represent a bold step toward a future where science moves at the speed of imagination because of AI,” said DoE under secretary for science and Genesis Mission lead Darío Gil. “It’s a game-changer for science, energy, and national security.”
Of course, given it’s a federal government project with lofty scientific ambitions that require reliable AI to achieve, there wasn’t a timeline given outside of the DoE saying it wants its AI efforts to “double the productivity and impact of US research and development within a decade.”
The 26-page document listing the various objectives is relatively brief, only describing the challenge, explaining how the DoE wants AI to solve it, justifying its inclusion in the list, and describing its potential national impact.
The goal of “accelerating delivery of nuclear fusion,” for example, says that today’s device-specific trials, isolated from other areas of dependency (e.g., connecting it to the grid, commercialization, etc.), aren’t enough to take fusion out of its perpetual status as always being 30 years away.
Digital twins, says the DoE, would allow physicists to experiment with fusion reactors and their various integrations more consistently, so the Genesis Mission will work on an “AI-Fusion Digital Convergence Platform” to do just that.
The platform envisioned by the Genesis team “will integrate novel algorithms in HPC codes, foundation models for plasma and materials science, physics- and chemistry-informed neural networks, surrogate models, and digital twins for whole-facility modeling and real-time control,” according to the DoE. Simple as that, then.
Many of the projects in the document are similarly vague and open-ended, like “reenvisioning advanced manufacturing and industrial productivity,” “securing US leadership in data centers,” and “achieving AI-driven autonomous laboratories.”
Other goals are a bit more grounded, such as digitizing and structuring more than eight decades of US nuclear data into secure, searchable datasets to inform future energy and security decisions, and applying AI to better predict water needs tied to the country’s expanding energy system. Still, many of the remaining challenges read more like high-level research prompts than deliverables, ambitious whether AI is involved or not.
According to White House office of science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios, the challenge list isn’t stopping at those 26 items. No timeline was given as to when more can be expected.
The Genesis Mission also comes as the Trump administration has slashed scientific funding, eliminated experts, and reduced research budgets across federal government branches, including at the Department of Energy.
The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget request asked Congress to cut DoE’s Office of Science from $8.24 billion in FY2025 to $7.092 billion, and to slash the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) account from $3.46 billion to $888 million. In the case of the Office of Science, Congress declined to adopt the proposed cut, with the FY2026 Energy and Water bill listing roughly $8.4 billion for the office, though other parts of DoE’s energy R&D portfolio still face reductions compared to prior levels.
Regardless of those reprieves, scientific professionals told The Register early in Trump’s second term that they were concerned that the future of US scientific leadership was at stake due to layoffs and cuts. As has been shown in the commercial world, it’s entirely possible AI science will leave the government begging for human researchers to take their jobs back. ®
Updated to add at 1935 GMT on February 13, 2026
The DoE has been in touch to tell us that, contrary to the fact that it’s been gutting science funding, the Trump administration isn’t deprioritizing science at all.
“As [Energy] Secretary Wright has said repeatedly, under the Trump administration, the department will prioritize true technological breakthroughs – such as nuclear fusion, high-performance computing, quantum computing, and AI – to maintain America’s global competitiveness,” a DoE spokesperson told The Register. “In other words, more science, less wasteful spending, and less politics involved in the process.”
The spokesperson cited investments in DoE laboratories and science investments in the Big Beautiful Bill as support for the DoE’s claim.
As for when the US may see some of the results of the Genesis Mission, the DoE told us that, while the hope is to double domestic R&D productivity within a decade, “early wins are expected within the next few years as pilot projects demonstrate accelerated breakthroughs in energy, materials science, and advanced manufacturing.”
