The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with industry partners, has announced a new class of open-weight foundation models designed specifically to accelerate scientific discovery as part of DOE’s broader Genesis Mission initiative. 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 systems 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, we are 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.
• 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).
  

DOE opened the Genesis open-weight models contribution portal today, hosted by the Genesis Mission US Open Models Initiative at https://genesisopenmodels.anl.gov/. 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 share your information through our interest form below. 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. The portal invites universities, national laboratories, companies, scientific nonprofits, and research organizations to contribute data, research environments, evaluations, and technical expertise. Applications for the first contribution window close August 14, 2026.

The program is seeking scientific and technical materials for several stages of model development.

Foundation-stage contributions may include scientific text, code, documentation, and structured technical collections suitable for pretraining, midtraining, or context extension.

Post-training contributions may include expert demonstrations, annotated task examples, research software, datasets, complete workflow environments, reinforcement-learning tasks, held-out evaluations, scoring rubrics, tests, and verifiers.

The program also needs scientists and engineers who can review tasks, model behavior, and completed artifacts. Infrastructure providers may submit rolling inquiries about additional training or evaluation capacity.

The 2026 program has two scheduled contribution tracks. Organizations may apply to both when the proposed contributions are distinct.

Applicants will identify the relevant track, describe the scientific work and its importance, explain what material is ready, name the experts available to support it, and state the proposed terms of use.

The public application form collects descriptions and metadata only. No scientific material is transferred during the application process, and each contributor specifies how its material may be handled.

Applications will be reviewed, with a DOE governed process with input from academic, national laboratory and industry partners, through five gates: scientific fit, rights and handling, expert and evaluation readiness, technical integration, and final program selection.

Selected contributors will work with the researchers building and evaluating Genesis Open Models. They will receive early evaluation access as the system develops and will be credited in the technical report and release materials.

The program is particularly interested in workflows that are poorly represented by standard Al evaluations and require direct collaboration with the researchers who perform the work.

Launched by executive order in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a Department of Energy-led national initiative to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence. Its stated goal is to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.

The mission connects DOE’s 17 national laboratories, leadership-class computing facilities, scientific data resources, and partners across industry and academia. DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil directs the Genesis Mission. More information is available at energy.gov/genesis-mission.