Hugging Face announces Project ProtoStar to make public science AI-ready

Hugging Face announced Project ProtoStar, an initiative bringing together universities, research organizations, companies and the open science community to make publicly funded research data, models and code easier to find, reuse and combine in AI research. Participants will support publishing these artifacts in AI-ready formats, on open infrastructure and with practical guidance; the first challenge, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, opens on November 2.

Hugging Face says the U.S. federal government invests about $190 billion annually in research and development, but public availability does not guarantee that materials are usable. The company says it hosts more than 17,000 scientific datasets—nearly 29,000 when medicine and mathematics are included—and that researchers shared more than three times as many new science datasets in the first nine months of 2026 as in the same period of 2025.