The Manhattan Project for AI Is Finally Here

For over a year, I’ve been pounding the table about the need for the Trump Administration to call upon the full resources of the United States of America to win the AI race.

In these pages, I warned you about the likelihood of AGI arriving in 2025…

And how artificial superintelligence — or ASI — won’t be far behind.

And we’re getting closer to this reality every day. Just last week, Google released its updated Gemini 3 AI model that beat all other models on a broad set of reasoning and knowledge benchmarks.

And it has an IQ equivalent to a highly gifted human on standard tests.

Then on Thursday, Anthropic released a new Claude update tuned specifically for long-context reasoning.

It’s tracking to match or exceed Gemini 3 on several core intelligence tasks.

But even with all of these advances pushing us towards AGI at lightning speed, there’s no guarantee that the U.S. will achieve ASI first.

It’s not hard to imagine a world where we lose the AI race to China.

A world in which China’s President Xi Jinping — NOT the United States — controls the most dominant military force on the planet.

According to a 212-page intelligence report from the Department of Defense, this is a very real threat facing our country today.

And that’s why I couldn’t be more excited about what the Trump Administration announced on Monday afternoon.

Because it could change the trajectory of the race to ASI forever.

Trump’s AI “Manhattan Project”

If you saw my viral presentation on Executive Order 001, you know I’ve been convinced that Trump would issue a massive multi-billion-dollar tech initiative to win the race to ASI.

I referred to it as Trump’s “Manhattan Project.”

This week, he made it real.

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump signed a new executive order creating a program called the “Genesis Mission.” It directs the Department of Energy, the national laboratories, America’s top universities and the country’s largest AI companies to build what the President is calling the American Science and Security Platform.

Here’s how it’s framed in the executive order:

Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth.  To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. 

In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.

The highlighted section is exactly what I predicted would happen many months ago.

You can think of this new initiative as a unified national AI engine. A system that connects the world’s most advanced supercomputers with the largest scientific datasets ever assembled and the most capable foundation models ever built.

According to Trump’s executive order, the purpose of this Genesis Mission is simple. Use artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security and push the U.S. toward the frontier of superintelligence.

It also notes that the U.S. must mobilize now to secure global leadership in artificial intelligence before our rivals lock in an advantage.

This is all the proof you need that this White House sees the AI race as the defining struggle of the twenty-first century.

And it’s about time.

Because China already treats it that way.

I’ve always believed that ASI won’t come from a single model or a single company. It will emerge from the convergence of compute, data, simulation, automation and scientific research.

No individual lab has all of that. And no private company does either.

But the United States does.

Our national laboratories have exascale supercomputers that no AI company can match. The DOE manages datasets in energy, materials science, climate, biology and physics that no corporation could ever recreate.

And the private sector builds the frontier models that push intelligence forward.

What this executive order does is bring all of it together under one mission that will accelerate discovery and protect our national security.

And it gives us a much better chance of winning the race to ASI.

Here’s My Take

This is exactly what I said would happen when Sam Altman called for a trillion dollars of global compute. It’s what DeepSeek forced us to rethink once it proved that China could leap ahead by scaling faster and cheaper.

And it is what Trump promised when he said America would not fall behind in artificial intelligence.

I believe this is the moment the race to ASI truly begins.

Because the Genesis Mission gives us something China doesn’t have yet: a unified national platform that links science, compute and intelligence under one strategic goal.

Of course, there will be bumps along the way. China is moving fast and has a simpler chain of command. And if this initiative gets tied up in bureaucracy, our advantage could vanish.

But the Genesis Mission gives America a path to control the future.

If we can execute even half of what is written in this order, we will accelerate breakthroughs at a pace the world has never seen.

After all, we’ve done it before.

Regards,

Ian King
Chief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing

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