Let There Be Weapons

The Department of Energy’s new Genesis Mission promises AI-accelerated discovery. Seven of its first 26 challenges focus on nuclear weapons and national security

- BY SARAH SCOLES

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.

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.)