Trump’s Genesis Mission is putting AI to work on nuclear weapons

The Department of Energy bills Genesis as an AI push for scientific discovery. Its first public challenges tell a different story

In the beginning, people created computers. Some of them said, “Let there be software,” and it was mostly good. Then they said, “Let the software be more intelligent,” and they called that intelligence artificial. And in November of 2025 the White House launched an AI program called the Genesis Mission.

Last November, by executive order, President Donald Trump tasked the Department of Energy—which oversees the nation’s nuclear stockpile—with leading a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”

Put more simply, the mission aims to build an AI platform, in partnership with universities and private companies, to tackle research in areas ranging from advanced manufacturing to biotechnology, nuclear energy to quantum information science, critical minerals to semiconductors.

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Most public descriptions of Genesis emphasize its scientific mission, much as the DOE itself tends to foreground supernova research and disease modeling over the warheads it maintains. But the 26 challenges the department released present a more martial side to the mission: seven focus on nuclear weapons and national security.

It makes sense that the DOE would be in charge of a big AI-for-research project, says Bahrad Sokhansanj, a research scholar at the Institute for Law and AI in Boston, who used to work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Because of both its research on nuclear weapons and its existing basic-science portfolio, the agency already has the right infrastructure. “It has labs, it has computers,” Sokhansanj says. “It has a lot of resources that are relevant to the future of science and technology.” (Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos National Laboratory and DOE headquarters did not respond to requests for comment.)

In fact, some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers live at the DOE labs. Genesis, Sokhansanj continues, is a way to focus those resources on a single strategic objective rather than letting them remain scattered across the government’s usual silos.