Hugging Face is releasing an AI model that could make it easier for scientists to study DNA and develop new genetic treatments, the company announced Thursday.
Carbon-X is a “first of its kind” model that combines DNA analysis and generation with plain language, allowing researchers to ask questions and essentially “chat with DNA,” according to Lewis Tunstall, a senior research scientist at Hugging Face.
Hugging Face, which Nvidia agreed to acquire for nearly $13 billion in September, is a platform for sharing and developing AI models and also releases its own. The company worked with research labs in Italy and China on Carbon-X, which is an open-source model. Hugging Face built Carbon-X by training an existing language model, Qwen3-14B, on genomic sequences and natural language. It was trained on DNA sequences from humans, other mammals, plants, and fungi.
As an example of how Carbon-X can be used, Tunstall said a researcher could provide a DNA sequence and ask whether a particular mutation could increase a person’s risk of disease. The model would then offer a prediction and explanation. It can also generate new DNA sequences, which could help researchers develop new gene therapies.
Tunstall said the company was partly motivated to build Carbon-X to prevent biology researchers from becoming dependent on the major AI labs, noting how AI has disrupted mathematics.
“If you want to really push the frontiers of mathematics, you likely have to be at one of these AI labs like OpenAI or Anthropic, because they’re the ones who have the best mathematics models,” he said, suggesting a similar situation is likely to play out in other fields of science.
“We wanted to provide the open research community with tools that don’t make them fully dependent on some external single provider,” he added.
Researchers can run Carbon-X on their own computers, avoiding the need to share sensitive patient data with external AI companies. He also said that some of the misalignment behavior observed in larger models, such as the OpenAI agents that famously hacked Hugging Face in July, has not yet been observed in smaller, more specialized models.
Tunstall said generalist chatbots also sometimes refuse to answer legitimate biology questions from researchers because they mistake them for attempts to “design a bioweapon.” He said viruses were explicitly excluded from Carbon-X’s training data in order to avoid misuse of the model.
While Carbon-X is likely to be used by researchers, Tunstall said the model represents a small step toward a future where AI can help provide more personalized medical care.
“I think the holy grail is, in general, this concept of personalized medicine where we’re able to, as individuals, take our own patient records, our own genomes, and use this to ultimately find or even maybe design our own treatments,” he said.
