US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order establishing the "Genesis Mission," a national initiative intended to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate scientific discovery, according to the White House.

The order on Monday describes AI as a defining arena of global technological competition and places the United States in what it calls a decisive race.

"From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress," the order said, noting that the challenges facing the country require a "historic national effort".

"This order launches the 'Genesis Mission' as 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," it said.

Under the order, the Department of Energy (DOE) will lead the initiative by building an integrated American Science and Security Platform — a unified AI system combining national laboratory supercomputers, secure cloud environments, AI agents, predictive models and access to the world’s largest collection of federally curated scientific datasets.

The DOE will have 90 days to map all available federal computing and storage resources, including potential partnerships with industry, and 120 days to identify the first datasets and AI model assets to be used.

Within 270 days, the department is expected to demonstrate the platform’s initial operational capability.