Asta Open-Sources AstaBrief 8B Report Generation Model

On October 2, 2026, Ai2's agentic scientific work platform Asta announced the open-sourcing of AstaBrief 8B, a scientific report generation model, along with its training data. The model converts a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a cited report, and is now available as Fast mode within Asta's Generate a report feature, alongside the Claude-powered Thinking mode.

Built on Qwen3-8B, AstaBrief was developed through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Its training data was derived from real research queries submitted by Asta users and filtered for signals such as citation density to improve evidence grounding. According to Asta, Fast mode generates a report in an average of 51.1 seconds, roughly 3.5 times faster than the 178.5 seconds averaged by Thinking mode.

In addition to the model weights, Asta released an example workflow that researchers can adapt to generate reports from their own PDFs, allowing institutions to deploy the model on their own infrastructure when research questions involve sensitive or unpublished work. The model and data are available on Hugging Face.