Bay Area laboratories are set to play a central role in the Genesis Mission, a multibillion-dollar effort by the Trump administration to accelerate the nation’s artificial intelligence push in the face of technological advances in China.

The involvement of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Menlo Park could help ensure the region’s positioning in the AI boom as the project seeks to “double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade,” according to the Department of Energy.

“China has fired their starter pistol and has organized what you would call the equivalent of their public sector. This is our answer to that,” said Brian Spears, the technical director of the Genesis Mission leading the scientific and engineering foundation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “This mission gives us a central, coherent and focused effort at scale in order to take advantage of what we can do.”

At Lawrence, AI researchers suggest AI could be deployed to generate hypotheses and push those ideas to the edge. As artificial intelligence takes shape as the biggest technological race of the 21st century, the United States hopes to leverage its advancements to solve the country’s most urgent and complicated problems. Spears said these include producing lifesaving drugs in years, rather than decades, and the quest to make fusion energy — the century-long effort by science to harness the power of stars on Earth — a practical reality.

“Throughout history, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo mission, our nation’s brightest minds and industries have answered the call when their nation needed them,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a DOE news release. “Today, the United States is calling on them once again.”

With a high-performance computer chip made by AMD, the new supercomputer El Capitan is the world’s speediest supercomputer. This will accelerate Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s efforts in nuclear security, as well as efforts in fusion energy, climate research and drug discovery. (Garry McLeod/LLNL)

The current competition to stay ahead of China and other nations mirrors past technological races in which the Bay Area played an essential part. In the 1940s, LLNL and BLNL physicists assisted with the Manhattan Project, the top-secret mission to develop nuclear weapons before Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The United States spent $2 billion on the initiative, equivalent to $30 billion today.

Now SLAC Accelerator National Lab scientists find themselves at the forefront of yet another pivotal technological race. Chris Tassone, associate lab director of energy at SLAC, said that AI is able to consume more information than any single person could in a lifetime, which has created a ceiling for how quickly scientific breakthroughs can be developed and deployed.

“In my lifetime, we have started generating scientific data at a rate that no human can understand … so if I cannot think at a million times a second, we need these types of tools to make sure we’re doing the best experiments possible when the data rates are that high,” said Tassone. “It is the next tool that’s going to augment how humans do science in ways that microscopes did and observatories did.”

But the consequences of not being the first to fulfill the potential of AI may be more dangerous than falling behind with a technology that is exponentially advancing, said Jonathan Carter, associate lab director of computer sciences at LBNL. When ChatGPT was released in 2020, the tech community marveled at its ability to have a mostly coherent, occasionally hallucinatory conversation. Now OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has released a tool that can create multimedia scenes from a bespoke prompt.

“Even if you look at the more pessimistic predictions on AI, AI will increase the productivity of scientists. And I think the only debate is, to what extent is it? Is it a factor of 10? Is it a factor of 1,000?” Carter said. “We could really end up lagging behind in just a few years.”

Though fears over the potential of artificial intelligence to endanger humanity have grown with the technology itself, Spears said the public should take some comfort in the fact that America’s national labs have been enlisted to build out AI. These neural networks are safeguarded in a closed loop, meaning they’re confined within the labs’ digital interfaces, to prevent the AI system from “breaking containment” and transferring itself to the internet.

“If that’s your concern, then you should be glad this is happening at the national labs, because we have a lot of experience with doing high-consequence, high-risk work,” Spears said.

Genesis Mission Technical Director and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory AI Innovation Incubator Director Brian Spears (left) and LLNL computer scientist Timo Bremer work with reasoning models from OpenAI during the “1,000 Scientist AI Jam Session” at LLNL in Feb. 2025. The event brought together over 1,400 Department of Energy scientists across multiple labs to collaborate hands-on with OpenAI and explore how cutting-edge AI models could transform scientific research.

While China’s public research is neck-and-neck with the United States, American AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are estimated to be months ahead of China’s private sector counterparts, Spears said. The breadth of AI development in Silicon Valley and “nerd-to-nerd connection” with the region’s national labs guarantees the technological race of the 21st century runs through the Bay Area for the foreseeable future, Spears said.

“The Genesis mission is there to build out the entire U.S. AI ecosystem for the advantage of American citizens — it’s to lift that ecosystem up on the public side, on the private side, and jointly put the U.S. at the front of this global race,” Spears said. “The Bay Area is playing a thought leadership role, both on the public side and the private side.”