Tier 0 Proprietary service
What the publisher claims: open research (paper, code, partial weights)
The one-liner: Frontier protein model, API only.
The six questions
Flagship weights are not downloadable; access is through the Biohub platform.
Use is governed by platform terms and an acceptable use policy rather than an open licence.
Runs only on Biohub hosted infrastructure.
The Science paper documents the corpus composition and training at unusual scale; data and recipe are not released.
There is no path to reproduce the 98B model.
Flagship weights are platform-only; no development channel exists.
License
Biohub platform terms and acceptable use policy; no published licence for flagship weights — license source ↗
- API and platform access only
- Acceptable Use Policy at biohub.org
What is actually released
- platform API access
- paper and supplementary methods
- SDK
Why it matters
Openness here is graded rather than binary: an open small model and a closed flagship under one roof.
Sources
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Biohub/esm/main/_assets/ESM3_README.md
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/evolutionaryscale/esm/main/README.md
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.