OpenAI4S is an open-source (MIT) research agent for scientists. JSON tools handle orchestration and approvals; the science runs as code in persistent Python/R kernels, with versioned artifacts and provenance. 604 Skills, 7 science databases, any model. Desktop apps for macOS, Linux and Windows (WSL2).
Hi Product Hunt! I'm Gongbo, a grad student at Peking University and one of the makers of OpenAI4S. The name reads "Open AI for Scientist": we're an academic open-source project and not affiliated with OpenAI.
Why we built it: most agents act by calling one JSON tool at a time. That works for booking a meeting, but research is loops, dataframes, alignments and simulations. Doing it one tool call at a time is slow, and the intermediate data ends up in the context window.
How it works: OpenAI4S splits the work into two planes. JSON tool calls handle orchestration: plans, permissions, approvals, metadata and external services. The science runs as complete code cells in persistent Python and R kernels, so a 100k-row DataFrame stays in the kernel and only a short summary reaches the model. Each session keeps an append-only action ledger, versioned artifacts and a notebook you can replay.
What's in the box:
• Desktop packages for macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux and Windows via WSL2, with the science stack (RDKit, Scanpy, Biopython...) bundled. Or pip install openai4s.
• 604 Skills, which are code recipes rather than tool schemas, including the 561-recipe bioSkills collection
• Connectors for UniProt, RCSB PDB, Ensembl, ChEMBL, PubChem, arXiv and OpenAlex
• Works with Doubao, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GPT, Claude or Gemini. It is built to run on low-cost models: in China, a ¥9.9/month (about US$1.4) Volcengine Ark plan is enough.
• OS sandboxing (Seatbelt on macOS, bubblewrap on Linux) and approvals for risky actions
It's free and MIT-licensed. Technical report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15096
We'd love feedback from people who do computational research: which workflows break, which Skills are missing, and what it would take for you to trust an agent's results enough to put them in a paper.