Tokyo-based Sakana AI has launched Sakana Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system that coordinates a swappable pool of specialized models through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Grounded in Sakana's TRINITY and Conductor research, the system acts as a strategic hedge against geopolitical export controls, such as the US restrictions that blocked Anthropic's Fable 5. Fugu Ultra matches or exceeds frontier models on benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro (73.7) and GPQA-Diamond (95.5), with pricing starting at $20/month.
Fugu multi-model orchestration launch
- ▪Sakana Fugu presents itself as a single foundation model that autonomously decides whether to answer directly or delegate tasks to a pool of specialized models
- ▪Sakana AI launched Sakana Fugu and Fugu Ultra on June 22, 2026, as a multi-agent orchestration system accessible through a single OpenAI-compatible API
Export control resilience strategy
- ▪Sakana Fugu is designed to provide resilience against vendor lock-in and geopolitical export controls by utilizing a swappable pool of underlying AI models
- ▪Anthropic revoked public access to Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 on June 12, 2026, following a United States government export control order
Orchestration architecture technical details
- ▪Sakana Fugu's architecture is grounded in two ICLR 2026 research papers from Sakana AI titled TRINITY and Conductor
- ▪Sakana Fugu is itself a language model trained to delegate tasks, manage sub-agent communication, and synthesize results using learned coordination strategies
Benchmark performance comparisons
- ▪Fugu Ultra scored 93.2 and standard Fugu scored 92.9 on LiveCodeBench, outperforming Gemini 3.1 Pro's score of 88.5
- ▪Fugu Ultra scored 95.5 on GPQA-Diamond, outperforming the Claude Mythos Preview score of 94.6
- ▪Fugu Ultra scored 73.7 on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, outperforming Claude Opus 4.8's score of 69.2 and GPT-5.5's score of 58.6
Pricing structure tiers
- ▪Sakana AI offers monthly subscription tiers for Fugu at $20 for Standard, $100 for Pro, and $200 for Max
- ▪Sakana Fugu is temporarily unavailable to operate or register users within the European Union and European Economic Area due to GDPR compliance processes
- ▪Fugu Ultra's pay-as-you-go pricing is fixed at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, doubling for context windows above 272K tokens
Sakana AI company background
- ▪Sakana AI was founded in Tokyo in 2023 by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito
- ▪Sakana AI co-founder Llion Jones is a co-author of the seminal 2017 Google research paper 'Attention Is All You Need'
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