Trump Energy Official Believes Genesis Mission Will Unlock Rapid Scientific Discovery
The DOE project hopes to connect tech firms, research universities and the national lab system with an AI backbone
WASHINGTON Feb, 27 2026 – A future where scientific research can be accelerated a hundredfold is coming, according to Darío Gil, undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy and leader of the Genesis Mission.
At an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, Gil outlined the promise and potential of the Genesis Mission, a project launched by Executive Order in November 2025.
“For the first time ever we can imagine an internet of science,” said Gil. “What we're building with the Genesis mission [is] to install the world's most complex and capable scientific instrument."
Nestled in the Department of Energy, the Genesis Mission aims to interject the capabilities of agentic AI systems into the national laboratory system to accelerate the scientific research and engineering development exponentially.
Gil noted that today, the national lab systems run on some of the best simulation computing in the world to run experiments and test hypotheses. The hope would be to use the data from these simulations to trail large language models to create predictive outputs, vastly improving efficiency and speeding up the process of discovery.
AI systems would be able to conduct the whole scientific method from research, hypothesis generation, experiment design, running simulations and analyzing results, faster than ever before.
“You can leverage AI for science to create agentic workflows that take a complex scientific chain,” Said Gil. “This five years ago was science fiction.”
This increased speed will only be possible with access to the large AI super computers found at Silicon Valley’s largest companies.
The Department of Energy has partnered with Microsoft, Google, AMD, Anthropic, OpenAi and Nvidia in a unique public private partnership to “ mobilize the entire capacity of capital, innovation, and scientific and engineering expertise of the ecosystem” toward this goal.
Universities have also started meeting with the DOE on this project and will ultimately play a key role in educating STEM majors on how to incorporate AI systems into their research, according to Gil.
While Gil noted that many in the AI community are concerned about the risks of rapidly scaling these AI systems, he believes that by demonstrating the capabilities of these systems to advance fusion technologies or quantum computing will bring detractors along.
“I really honestly believe that the next generation of scientists and engineers that are being trained that are native to this way of thinking are gonna be the ones that change [this perspective],”Gil said. “I think we have to have an approach where everybody's invited, everybody can participate.”
In the end, Gil believes that by connecting the private sector, research universities and national lab system, with an AI stack, could yield some of the most powerful technological advances ever seen. In the race to compete with China on AI, Gil believes we need to move quickly.
“It is moving faster than people think, in the application of this, and there's a diffusion barrier of people in my role to communicating with the stakeholders necessary to scale it up,” Gil said. “The Genesis mission has to scale… this is an ambitious vision, and an exciting vision.”
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