US President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order for the \u201cGenesis Mission\u201d, a national campaign to use artificial intelligence (AI) to boost scientific breakthroughs. In the opening section, the mission is explicitly described as \u201ccomparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project\u201d.<\/p>\n
The comparison is compelling, but also misleading. At first glance, the order evokes the image of America in the 1940s, muscular and confident, mobilising the whole nation to end World War II. A close reading, however, reveals a different reality.<\/p>\n
Los Alamos in 1942 bears little resemblance to Silicon Valley<\/a> in 2025. The difference is not technical but structural. With Washington planning to integrate resources from the Department of Energy and tech giants in California, the Genesis Mission signals a fundamental retreat of US state capacity: America has devolved from a sovereign owner to a mere tenant.The Manhattan Project<\/a> \u2013 to produce the first nuclear weapons \u2013 was defined by state sovereignty. Although private contractors like Chrysler and DuPont were involved, the federal government was the undisputed architect. It seized the land, hired the scientists and set the agenda \u2013 and, most importantly, it controlled the research patents. The state owned the engine of innovation.<\/p>\n With the Genesis Mission, the relationship is inverted. Section 3 of the executive order requires that the secretary of energy secure access to \u201cproprietary\u201d data sets; Section 5 demands the establishment of \u201cclear policies for ownership \u2026 and commercialisation of intellectual property\u201d. Evidently, Washington is not creating knowledge at the frontier of science, but standing in line like any other customer, seeking to buy tech services it does not own, control or even understand.<\/p>\n Worse, Washington cannot guarantee the money. The phrase \u201csubject to available appropriations\u201d appears six times in the order, revealing the mission as an unfunded mandate. This explains why section 3 instructs the DOE to \u201c\u201cidentify \u2026 resources available through industry partners.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order for the \u201cGenesis Mission\u201d, a national campaign to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[3250,586,7987,2136,4759,40614,26714,2219,40612,75,84,83,1924,9,24,63,40611,13881,40613,618,6648],"class_list":["post-82532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-ai","tag-amazon","tag-america","tag-california","tag-department-of-energy","tag-dupont","tag-genesis-mission","tag-intel","tag-los-alamos","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-manhattan-project","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-oak-ridge","tag-silicon-valley","tag-tennessee-valley-authority","tag-us","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}