“A Band-Aid on a giant gash”: Trump’s attacks on science may ruin his AI moonshot

By executive order last month, Donald Trump launched his so-called “Genesis Mission.”

Described as a “historic national effort” to “invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement,” Trump claimed his mission would address key challenges to American energy dominance, innovation, and national security.

This mission, Trump boasted, would be a game-changer to science akin to putting a man on the moon or firing the first nuclear weapons. By building “an integrated AI platform” trained on “the world’s largest collection” of federal scientific data sets, he promised, the government could set off cascades of scientific breakthroughs.

Access to such a platform, Trump imagined, would supercharge top US labs, powering AI agents to do tasks like quickly test hypotheses and automate research workflows to speed up discoveries.

However, the mission crucially depends on strengthening collaboration between public, private, and academic sectors. And Trump’s order is concerningly vague on how those ...