he U.S. is doubling down on its push to stay ahead of China in AI.
On Monday, the White House announced the “Genesis Mission,” an executive order aimed at accelerating national AI development, harnessing federal datasets to train models for scientific research and discovery.
The order directs the Department of Energy to create a secure, unified platform for AI experimentation to generate frontier models. Michael Krastios, science advisor to President Donald Trump, told CBS News that the project will empower scientists to reach currently unreachable breakthroughs, shortening “discovery timelines from years to days or even hours."
The initiative is just the latest in a string of moves by the Trump Administration to secure AI supremacy in the heated race with China, having signed the AI Action Plan earlier this year and fighting against regulation that seeks to put boundaries on AI development in the name of safety. In the administration’s press release, it noted that the race to claim AI dominance was “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.”
As it stands, the US has the advantage of a strong concentration of advanced models, a strong talent pool and hardware and infrastructure that’s largely restricted from being sent to China, Thomas Randall, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View.
And these efforts stand to greatly benefit US-based AI companies. The department will partner with a number of private sector tech giants on the project, including Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AMD, and Amazon.
“Much of this progress comes from the private sector, while government efforts mainly focus on helping innovation move faster, even if that means the country has fewer formal AI safety frameworks in place,” said Randall.
Chinese firms, however, are making their own strides, particularly on open source and low-cost AI. In mid-November, Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI released its Kimi K2 Thinking model, a trillion-parameter open source model. Firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba-backed Z.ai each have released their own open source, affordable models this past year. And AI demand is quickly growing in the country, as evidenced by Alibaba’s cloud revenues hiking 34% this past quarter.
“It is moving fast in open-source AI and is very effective at weaving AI into daily life,” Randall said. “Because so many digital services in China are centralized and widely adopted, new AI features can spread across the population quickly.”