The U.S. Department of Energy has published an advisory committee report that targets three AI-driven national missions: engineering biology at digital speed, accelerating fusion toward a grid-connected pilot plant by 2030–2035, and rebuilding domestic rare-earth magnet production within five years.

DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil announced the report, Genesis Mission Frameworks for AI-Accelerated National Breakthroughs, on Sept. 28, 2026. The Office of Science Advisory Committee's Genesis Mission Subcommittee produced it as a strategic assessment for DOE's broader Genesis Mission — a national initiative that mobilizes the agency's 17 National Laboratories alongside industry, academia, federal agencies, international partners and philanthropy.

The initiative's core deliverable is a unified scientific AI platform connecting high-performance supercomputing, AI, quantum systems and experimental facilities. The platform is designed to tackle 33 designated national science and technology challenges, ranging from fusion energy to pediatric cancer. From those challenge areas, the subcommittee selected three frontiers for deeper analysis.

Biology as an engineering discipline

The first frontier addresses a decades-long asymmetry: the ability to read genetic code has far outpaced the ability to interpret and engineer it. The committee argues that a dedicated AI-biology campaign can close that gap, converting biology from an observational science into a predictive, engineerable discipline.

The commercial stakes are large. The report cites analyses projecting the global bioeconomy could reach $10 trillion by 2050, and frames predictive biological design as the mechanism to secure American leadership in that sector.

The committee outlines concrete targets that remain roadmaps rather than demonstrated results. Integrated AI-enabled measurement, modeling and manufacturing loops could, in its assessment, engineer microbes that convert carbon dioxide into cost-competitive jet fuel on the first batch. The same loops could compress therapeutic development timelines, producing designs for previously "undruggable" cancer genes in nine months.

Fusion on an AI timetable

The second frontier tackles fusion. Controlling a burning plasma spans six orders of magnitude in space and time, an engineering problem the report describes as massive. AI's role would be to convert those fundamental uncertainties into solvable engineering problems — guiding design decisions and predicting superheated reactions in real time.

The stated benchmark is a national milestone: delivering an operational U.S. fusion pilot plant to the power grid by 2030–2035. The committee's position is that AI-driven acceleration of design cycles is vital to hitting that window, and that success would secure a major energy source for the U.S. economy.

Magnet sovereignty in five years

The third frontier addresses a supply chain vulnerability with direct semiconductor-adjacent relevance. Critical rare-earth permanent magnets are essential components in electric vehicles, defense systems and wind turbines, and the United States currently relies heavily on a single foreign supply chain for them.

The committee proposes an urgent five-year AI mission to establish what it calls "Magnet Sovereignty" through a closed-loop domestic learning system. The approach has two tracks. First, AI-driven search across millions of material combinations could discover high-performance magnet formulations that bypass rare and difficult-to-obtain minerals. Second, intelligent AI sensors deployed across domestic manufacturing lines, paired with automated recycling systems, would enable recovery and reuse of critical materials from discarded electronics inside U.S. borders.

The path forward

Gil frames the report's significance in competitive terms. The defining question, he writes, is not whether AI will transform science and engineering — it will — but whether the United States leads that transformation or cedes it to strategic competitors.

The committee's findings position the Genesis Mission as a vehicle to accelerate discovery, strengthen American competitiveness and secure the energy supply chain. The closing argument: by combining the processing power of the National Laboratory system with the scientific community's talent, discovery can move past the bottleneck of manual trial and error.

For the fusion, bioeconomy and magnet-supply missions alike, the report establishes frameworks and targets rather than funded programs — and the pace at which DOE converts these AI missions into operational capacity will determine whether the 2030–2035 fusion milestone and five-year magnet timeline remain credible dates.