OpenAI has recently announced that it signed an agreement with the U.S. National Laboratories to help them “supercharge’ their scientific research.

Under the agreement, around 15,000 scientists working at the National Laboratories will get first-hand access to OpenAI’s top models like the reasoning-focused o1 series.

“OpenAI’s collaboration with the U.S. National Labs builds on the long-standing tradition of the U.S. government collaborating with private industry to ensure that technological innovation leads to meaningful improvements in healthcare, energy, and other critical fields. It also reflects our ongoing commitment to empowering leading developers to safely leverage our models–transforming data into intelligence and intelligence into solutions, breakthroughs and discoveries,” OpenAI said in a blog.

OpenAI’s model will be used to:

• Accelerating the basic science that underpins U.S. global technological leadership

• Identifying new approaches to treating and preventing disease

• Enhancing cybersecurity and protecting the American power grid

• Achieving a new era of U.S. energy leadership by unlocking the full potential of natural resources and revolutionizing the nation’s energy infrastructure

• Improving U.S. security through improved detection of natural and man-made threats, such as biology and cyber, before they emerge

• Deepening our understanding of the forces that govern the universe, from fundamental mathematics to high-energy physics 

Last month, the San Francisco-based startup also introduced ChatGPT Gov, a specialized version of ChatGPT designed to be used by the U.S. government.

Government agencies in the U.S. will be able to deploy ChatGPT Gov within their Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government cloud using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service.

According to OpenAI, self-hosting ChatGPT Gov allows agencies to better manage security, privacy, and compliance needs, including stringent cybersecurity frameworks like IL5, CJIS, ITAR, and FedRAMP High.