---
type: "Evidence Item"
title: "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and OpenAI partner to accelerate federal permitting"
description: "OpenAI and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory introduce DraftNEPABench, a new benchmark evaluating how AI coding agents can accelerate federal permitting—showing potential to."
resource: "https://openai.com/index/pacific-northwest-national-laboratory"
tags: ["appendix-iii", "benchmark", "openai"]
timestamp: "2026-02-26"
category: "benchmark"
publisher: "OpenAI"
cope_score: 86
confidence: 0.9
---

# Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and OpenAI partner to accelerate federal permitting

# Claim

OpenAI and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory introduce DraftNEPABench, a new benchmark evaluating how AI coding agents can accelerate federal permitting—showing potential to reduce NEPA drafting time by up to 15% and modernize infrastructure reviews.

# Relevance

Appendix III, section one: model and benchmark capability evidence

# Oracle Verdict

OpenAI is describing a frontier or production capability that pushes directly on the thesis. The important signal is not the marketing language; it is the widening set of tasks now being routed through model-driven execution rather than ordinary software or headcount.

# Metadata

* Publisher: OpenAI
* Category: benchmark
* Sector: Software engineering
* Capability: Frontier model release and benchmark movement
* Cope score: 86
* Confidence: 0.9

# Related Concepts

* [Live evidence index](index.md)
* [Thesis](../thesis.md)

# Citations

[1] [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and OpenAI partner to accelerate federal permitting](https://openai.com/index/pacific-northwest-national-laboratory)