Main Points

• On November 24, President Trump issued Executive Order 14363, launching the Genesis Mission, a sweeping national AI R&D initiative that seeks to centralize scientific discovery, establish federal primacy over AI innovation, and leverage national laboratories, federal datasets, and AI agents to accelerate breakthroughs across critical technology sectors.
• Multiple related federal bills have recently been introduced, including this week the GENESIS Act (H.R. 6360) and the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act.
• In parallel, the bipartisan State Attorneys General AI Task Force, launched on November 13, will focus on resisting federal AI preemption, strengthening child-safety and consumer protections, and asserting the states’ regulatory authority.
• Together these developments signal an escalating confrontation between federal efforts to consolidate AI governance and state movements to preserve regulatory autonomy. 
   

The Genesis Mission: A Federal AI Acceleration Strategy

On November 24, President Trump issued Executive Order 14363, launching the Genesis Mission, a large-scale federal initiative that aims to build a platform for academic researchers and AI firms to create AI models using the federal government’s scientific data. The EO frames its goal as positioning the United States as a leader in the “race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence” for both national security and economic competitiveness. This initiative expands the ongoing AI research and development efforts by the administration and aligns itself with the White House AI Action Plan by expanding the federal government’s role in scientific experimentation in AI and creating a federal AI architecture for competitiveness, as we’ve covered.

The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology will lead the Genesis Mission in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE), National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), Federal Chief Data Officer Council, Chief AI Officer Council, Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, and relevant agencies and departments.

At the center of the EO is the development of the “American Science and Security Platform,” which will include the DOE, National Labs at DOE, Federal Chief Data Officers (CDO) Council, and federal CAIO Corps to develop infrastructure comprising:

• High-performance computing (DOE supercomputers and secure cloud)
• AI foundation-model training and scientific agents
• Robotics and automated experimentation systems
• Federally curated, proprietary, and synthetic research datasets
• Predictive modeling frameworks across energy, materials science, quantum computing, and biotechnology

The core objectives are to build an integrated AI platform to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to automate research workflows and test hypotheses. The EO envisions the platform and mission to accelerate breakthroughs in areas like biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fission and fusion, and quantum information science.

Administration officials have expressed their support for the Genesis Mission, with Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios describing the Mission as “the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program.” Similarly, DOE Secretary Chris Wright emphasized that the initiative would “unleash the full power of our National Laboratories, supercomputers, and data resources to ensure that America is the global leader in artificial intelligence.”

Technology firms, including multiple quantum and biotech firms, have been listed as collaborators in the Genesis Mission. This creates a public-private partnership that will provide private corporations with vast access to federal scientific datasets for AI analysis. Industry associations such as the Information Technology Industry Council have also praised the effort, arguing it will “accelerate the pace of AI R&D and showcase American innovation.”

Critics of the Genesis Mission point to the apparent tension between President Trump’s EO that appears to be promoting scientific research of leveraging AI with the administration’s simultaneous budget cuts for scientific research. Former OSTP Director under the Biden administration, Arati Prabhakar, acknowledged the validity of the Genesis Mission but expressed concerns over general budget cuts, stating that budget cuts to scientific research were “extremely destructive to the science and technology enterprise.”

Legislative Activity Surrounding the Launch of the Genesis Mission

Congressional activity following the Genesis Mission Executive Order suggests a rapidly evolving legislative landscape that both reinforces and complicates the administration’s ambitions. The GENESIS Act (H.R. 6360), introduced on December 2 and sponsored by Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-UT), moves to codify the EO by granting it the “full force of law,” effectively insulating the Mission from reversal by future administrations via executive action alone and signaling congressional support for a long-term, federally driven AI-science infrastructure.

At the same time, the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act, reintroduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and a number of House Democrats, operates as a countervailing proposal that reflects broader unease with the administration’s deregulatory posture. This Act seeks “to prevent companies from using biased and discriminatory AI-powered algorithms to help make critical decisions in Americans’ lives, ensure algorithms are tested before and after deployment, and increase transparency of complex algorithms used for critical decisions.”

Additionally, the USPTO’s Revised Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions, issued just two days after the EO, complements the administration’s strategy by reclassifying AI as an “instrument” and expanding patent eligibility for AI-assisted discoveries, an explicit incentive to attract private-sector participation in the Genesis research ecosystem.

Taken together, these legislative and administrative developments illustrate how Congress and federal agencies are positioning themselves around the Genesis framework, either by embedding the EO into statutory law, reinforcing its innovation-first philosophy, or pushing for counterbalances in civil rights and funding domains that may shape how the Mission ultimately operates.

While the Genesis Mission is framed as a research accelerator, its structure implies a deeper policy purpose: consolidating the federal government’s role in setting national AI priorities and, implicitly, limiting state regulatory friction. By positioning AI-driven scientific discovery as a matter of national competitiveness and security, the administration is laying the groundwork for additional preemption arguments parallel to the draft EO on state AI laws, the issuance of which has been deferred.

Bipartisan State Attorneys General AI Task Force

On November 13, Attorneys General Jeff Jackson (D-NC) and Derek Brown (R-UT) launched a bipartisan State Attorneys General AI Task Force in partnership with the Attorney General Alliance (AGA), joined by two major technology firms as founding corporate partners. Together they agree to collaborate on safety frameworks to avoid conflicting state laws. The coalition represents the most organized, state-led AI regulatory initiative to date. Its founding focus on “anti-preemption” is a response to the White House AI Action Plan’s federal-first architecture, and the task force was launched to resist this preemption strategy.

The coalition has articulated three strategic objectives:

1. Anti-preemption: Preventing Congress and the Trump administration from passing preemption clauses through the NDAA that would nullify state AI laws. The Task Force argues that a federal ban on state regulation without a comprehensive federal replacement will create a regulatory vacuum that endangers the public.
2. Consumer and child safety: Developing unified minimum safety expectations for child-facing generative AI systems and addressing AI-enabled fraud.
3. Agile, state-led regulation: The attorneys general argue that states have historically moved faster than federal agencies in addressing emerging tech harms, citing their successes in social media litigation.

The timeline of developments surrounding the State Attorneys General AI Task Force underscores how quickly the federal–state conflict over AI authority has intensified. The Task Force formally launched on November 13, positioning itself as a bipartisan coalition dedicated to resisting federal preemption and establishing baseline child-safety and consumer protection standards for AI systems. Only days later, on November 19, a draft Executive Order, “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy,” was reported by several media outlets. The draft EO reportedly proposed creating a DOJ-led AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI statutes in federal court, and hinted that the administration might leverage federal broadband and science-funding streams to pressure states into aligning with a federal deregulatory framework, as we’ve previously written. As of the date of this newsletter’s publication, this EO has not been signed.

In direct response to the reported EO and to preemption language then under consideration in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), 36 attorneys general, led by New York AG Letitia James, sent an urgent letter to Speaker Mike Johnson on November 25. The letter warned that a federal preemption clause in the reconciled FY26 NDAA would “create a regulatory vacuum,” undermine state consumer protection authority, and impede states’ ability to respond to emerging AI harms.

Taken together, the EO on the Genesis Mission and the State Attorneys General AI Task Force demonstrates the restructuring and tension of AI authority between the federal government and the states. While the draft EO on state preemption that we have previously reported on remains unpublished, there is no shortage of regulatory actions on AI, as exemplified by the EO and the State Attorneys General Task Force. We will continue tracking updates across the NDAA, agency rulemaking, and state coalition activity on AI governance and development.