Ai2 open-sources AstaBrief 8B, a model for writing cited scientific reports

On October 2, 2026 Ai2 announced that it is open-sourcing AstaBrief 8B, a model that turns a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report, along with its training data. Ai2 says the model was built from Qwen3-8B using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization, and that it is available as Fast mode in the "Generate a report" feature of Asta, its platform for scientific work. The Hugging Face model card lists the Apache 2.0 license. Ai2 notes that most of the training and evaluation was completed in 2025 and that it has not rerun the full evaluation against today's frontier models.12