Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and OpenAI partner to accelerate federal permitting

OpenAI has partnered with PNNL and its PermitAI team to evaluate whether coding agents can accelerate federal permitting work.

PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, and PermitAI is funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Policy.

Researchers developed DraftNEPABench as a benchmark to assess AI on NEPA workflow tasks; 19 subject-matter experts helped design it.

NEPA tasks include drafting environmental impact statements across federal agencies.

Models were given command-line access to use general strategies, and Codex CLI was used to extract performance from reasoning models like GPT‑5 on file-system research, technical analysis, and report-writing tasks.