By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science
Office of the Under Secretary for Science
August 7, 2026
Estimated Read Time min
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is launching an initiative to produce a new class of open-weight foundation models designed specifically to accelerate scientific discovery as part of DOE’s broader Genesis Mission, and is requesting input from potential contributors from commercial, academic, and research institutions. These Genesis models aim to provide researchers, National Laboratories, industry partners, and the broader open science community with powerful, transparent, and extensible AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of scientific domains and use cases. The first model in this class will be Genesis-Science-1, developed in partnership with Arcee.
By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science: enabling new workflows in materials discovery, energy systems, earth system modeling, fusion, biology, high-energy physics, and beyond. This effort is grounded in the principles of open science, reproducibility, and responsible AI, with the goal of lowering barriers to advanced AI capabilities for the public good.
As part of this initiative, DOE is collecting information from interested participants who would like to contribute to and benefit from this new ecosystem:
- Open-weight models: Organizations to provide open-weight models both as base models to support downstream fine-tuning and for immediate deployment. Models should have transparent provenance with training data and evaluation procedures developed through this initiative.
- Pretraining contributions: Organizations and researchers with access to high-quality, domain-specific scientific data who are interested in contributing to future pretraining cycles (e.g., curated datasets, benchmarks, or specialized corpora).
- Fine-tuning efforts: Teams interested in shaping downstream, domain-adapted versions of Genesis-Science-1 and future models for particular scientific fields, applications, or mission needs (e.g., lab assistants, simulation surrogates, scientific copilots).
If you or your organization are interested in participating, either by contributing models and data, co-developing evaluations and benchmarks, or collaborating on fine-tuning and application deployments, please visit the Genesis Mission US Open Models Initiative website for more information. Applications for the first contribution window for pretraining efforts close on August 14, 2026, and for fine-training efforts on August 25, 2026. Additional deadlines will be rolling and are expected every three months.
Your engagement will help shape the capabilities, governance, and impact of Genesis-Science-1 and other Genesis open models as a shared public asset for scientific innovation.