The U.S. Department of Energy launched the Genesis Open Models Initiative, a program to release open-weight foundation models designed for scientific discovery, according to the initiative's site hosted at Argonne National Laboratory.
The effort sits inside the Genesis Mission, the department's AI program created by executive order in November 2025. The mission connects the department's 17 national laboratories and its leadership-class computing facilities, with a stated goal of doubling the productivity of American science and engineering within a decade.
The department has been moving quickly to staff the mission with partners. It has announced collaboration agreements with 24 organizations, and a March funding opportunity produced 278 team-based awards spanning 342 institutions, all of which gain access to the Genesis Mission Platform, its models and its computing resources.
OpenAI is among the companies working with the department and has described a deepening collaboration on scientific models.
Open-weight releases from a government program would give founders and researchers an alternative to frontier lab licensing for scientific workloads, and the announcement drew immediate attention from developers on Hacker News.