openscience

OpenScience is an AI agent built to run the actual research loop. Point it at a goal and it reads the papers that matter, forms a hypothesis, writes and runs code, executes experiments, queries databases like UniProt, PDB, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar, and writes up what it found. It is open source (Apache 2.0) and model-agnostic. Bring your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or dozens of other providers and the whole thing runs free, no account required.

Install is a single npm command, and it opens a full workspace in your browser: file tree, editor, terminal, session history, plus inline rendering for molecules, structures, and plots. There is no server to run or database to manage. The real cost is whatever API usage you rack up with your chosen model provider, which for a long research session with a frontier model adds up fast.

Solo researchers and small labs can run this entirely on bring-your-own-key pricing. The optional paid layer is Atlas, Synthetic Sciences own managed platform: a prepaid wallet for a curated set of frontier models plus cloud compute, so a team does not need to juggle five providers API keys or provision its own GPUs. Solo: free. Small teams: free or Atlas if you want managed compute. Larger teams doing heavy experimentation: Atlas is the easier path.

The agent is not sandboxed. It runs shell commands and edits files with the permissions you give it, so if you are pointing it at real infrastructure or sensitive data, run it in a container or VM. The permission system tells you what it is doing, it does not stop it from doing something you did not mean to allow.