DOE selects first 278 Genesis Mission AI-for-science projects across 342 institutions

US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced on July 22 the first wave of Genesis Mission awards: 278 AI-for-science projects across 342 participating institutions. The Department of Energy said the program drew the largest response to a funding opportunity in its history.

The Genesis Mission projects span 16 Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration laboratories, 142 universities, 157 companies, 13 nonprofits and 14 other institutions. The largest single award is a $60 million, three-year nuclear-energy investment.

“The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise,” Wright said.

One project shows how commercial AI models are moving into national-lab research. Meta said its open-weight Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) and DINOv3 vision models power SYNAPS-I, a Genesis Mission project led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Argonne, Brookhaven, Oak Ridge and SLAC national laboratories.

The system automates parts of the experimental loop rather than only crunching data after the fact. It “analyzes data as it’s produced and guides experiments in real time, replacing slow manual steps with adaptive, automated decision-making,” DOE Under Secretary Dario Gil said.

The awards are selections, not results. The projects still have to deliver working systems and reproducible science, and using vision models trained largely on everyday imagery for specialized instrument data is an open technical question. What the announcement fixes is scale and intent: a federal push to wire AI into the day-to-day of physics, chemistry and energy labs.