Who gets to understand AI?

As AI becomes critical infrastructure for science, medicine, industry, and government, one question matters more than ever: who gets to understand how these systems work? At Ai2, that question is central to our work, and it’s what motivates our commitment to open science and open models. For us, openness is more than a licensing choice—it shapes how we build, release, and evaluate our work.

Open-weight models let people use and adapt AI for their own research and applications. They give organizations greater choice, reduce dependence on any single provider, and lower barriers to developing new applications and scientific tools. 

With our fully open releases, we go further by sharing the training data, code, methods, checkpoints, evaluations, and documentation behind the models. We do this because we believe the ability to understand how AI works shouldn't be locked up in a few hands—it should be available to researchers and institutions working to advance scientific knowledge.

This is what open science looks like in AI: producing research that others can inspect, test, and extend.

Researchers need more than access to a model’s outputs. They need the data, code, checkpoints, evaluations, and training process behind it to reproduce results, investigate behavior, test limitations, and assess claims about safety and reliability. Trust comes from allowing independent researchers to examine the evidence rather than relying solely on a developer’s assurances.

The clearest measure of open research’s value is the new science it makes possible. By releasing the evidence behind our models, Ai2 enables independent researchers to examine questions that closed systems leave difficult – or impossible – to investigate.