Last week, the White House unveiled the Genesis Mission, an ambitious plan to build a national AI platform for scientific discovery. (see the Executive Order, Press Release, Fact Sheet, and glitzy promo video).

The Executive Order calls for “build[ing] an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” 

The aim is to “win the race for global technology dominance.” As with other Administration policies, it seeks to do so by centralizing control over the direction of scientific research in the White House, affording universities and the public little to no input.

The order directs the Department of Energy to integrate its supercomputers, national laboratories, robotic facilities, and vast scientific datasets into a single “closed-loop” AI system to power breakthroughs across fields from biotechnology and materials science to fusion, semiconductors, and quantum computing.

A closed-loop AI system is one in which data, models, compute, and experimental results circulate within a single, self-contained environment, with little or no external visibility, external review, or public access.

With a sixty-day deadline to identify “20 science and technology challenges of national importance” to tackle, the scale and speed of Genesis are ambitious. “Built on artificial intelligence and quantum computing, it will radically redefine the scale, speed, and purpose of scientific progress in America.”

This policy could amount to the most significant centralization of federal research infrastructure since the early Cold War. 

But the initiative's boldness only heightens three unresolved questions that deserve urgent public attention and outcry.

1. A Manhattan Project, not a Moonshot for AI 

Genesis consolidates unprecedented scientific power in the DOE and the White House. Agencies must share datasets, align research, and integrate infrastructure, yet the Executive Order creates no mechanisms for public participation or democratic accountability. This includes:

• No independent ethics or safety review,

• No public or community or even science expert participation,

• No oversight in who will determine the questions worth studying  

• No requirement for transparency or auditability,

• No process for assessing social impacts.

There’s no mention of advisory committee oversight or adherence to the transparent processes called for by the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

The order invokes the wartime mobilizations of the 1940s and 1960s, where secrecy and speed were the point. But AI-accelerated science is not a weapons program. Prioritizing problems, shaping datasets, and steering national research should be a deep public decision.

If Genesis is a national scientific initiative, where is the nation’s voice?

2. Public Infrastructure — or a Federal–Industrial Fortress?

Genesis is described as a closed-loop AI platform that uses proprietary, federal, and synthetic data under tight national security constraints. In science, closed systems historically slow discovery by limiting replication, critique, and innovation outside the institution that controls the tools. The project's website lists dozens of exclusively corporate partners. The order leaves fundamental access and transparency questions unanswered:

• Who gets to use this system?

• Are universities — especially public ones — meaningfully included?

• Will independent researchers, nonprofits, or smaller labs have a pathway in? The website says “DOE will open parts of the Genesis Mission platform to qualified researchers, innovators, and companies,” but all the listed partners are companies.

•  Who will decide what corporate partners are allowed in, and what’s the price of admission?

The plan talks of facilitating “agency collaboration with external partners” and “establish[ing] clear policies for ownership, licensing, trade-secret protections,” marking a significant departure from fifteen years of open data policy that ensures that the fruits of taxpayer investment in data are widely shared. 

Is Genesis the next great public research platform — or the world’s most powerful gated environment?

Without safeguards, public compute and data could become de facto subsidies for the largest AI labs and corporations.

3. A National AI Effort Misaligned With Public Needs

If the administration is committing to a once-in-a-generation scientific moonshot, the target matters. The priority domains (critical minerals, semiconductors, nuclear energy, quantum, “energy dominance,” and national security) overwhelmingly reflect industrial strategy and geopolitical competition. 

Notably absent are many of the issues that most affect communities:

• Climate resilience and environmental science,

• Public health,

• Agricultural sustainability,

• Housing, labor, and social infrastructure,

• Research that would strengthen governance and democratic institutions.

Genesis is pitched as a breakthrough engine for scientific progress. But its priorities suggest a narrower goal: accelerating strategically valuable and commercially aligned science rather than the work that would most directly improve people’s lives.

Why launch a national AI moonshot without aiming it at the problems the public most urgently faces?

Why These Questions Matter

The Genesis Mission could transform U.S. scientific capability. But without public oversight, broad access, and priorities rooted in societal need, it risks becoming a centralized, closed, and strategically narrow system — powerful enough to reshape science, but not necessarily in ways that serve the public.

As the administration races ahead, the rest of us should be asking: who will control this new engine of scientific progress? Who will benefit? And what kind of scientific future is being built in our name?