Overview
Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research company ($2.6B Series B valuation, late 2025) founded by Llion Jones (Attention Is All You Need co-author) and David Ha (ex-Google Brain). Known for AI Scientist automated research and fugu multi-agent model-orchestration.
Fugu Launch (June 2026)
- 2026-06-22: Launched fugu — learned orchestrator routing to swappable frontier LLM pool via OpenAI-compatible API (2026-06-22-sakana-fugu-official-launch)
- Positioned as hedge against US export controls on claude-mythos/Fable 5
- Grounded in TRINITY + Conductor (ICLR 2026); technical report arXiv 2606.21228
- EU/EEA restricted pending GDPR alignment
AI Scientist-v2 Achievement
- 2026-03-26: AI Scientist-v2 published in nature, becoming the first fully AI-generated paper to pass rigorous human peer review
- AI-generated paper achieved average score of 6.33 at ICLR 2025 ICBINB workshop
- Surpassed human acceptance threshold, scoring higher than 55% of human-authored submissions
- System can autonomously execute entire ML research lifecycle: ideas, literature, experiments, LaTeX papers
Research Capabilities
AI Scientist-v2 demonstrates:
- Novel research idea generation
- Literature review and synthesis
- Experimental design and execution
- Complete scientific paper writing
- Scaling laws: foundation model improvement correlates with paper quality
Collaborations
- University of British Columbia (UBC)
- Vector Institute
- University of Oxford
Related
- fugu
- model-orchestration
- multi-agent-systems
- ai-scientist
- automated-research
- nature
- agentic-ai
- mythos-fragmentation-2026